Professor Piotr Sztompka

Piotr Sztompka is a professor of sociology and the Head of the Chair of Theoretical Sociology at the Jagiellonian University at Krakow, Poland. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea (London) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston). In 2002 at the World Congress of Sociology at Brisbane (Australia) he was elected a President of the International Sociological Association (ISA), and served until 2006.. In 1995 he was awarded a major international award New Europe Prize, and was also for two times a laureate of the Academic Prize of the Prime Minister of Poland. He also received Pitirim Sorokin Prize and the honorary doctor degree from The State University of the Social Sciences at Moscow. He has been a frequent visiting professor at the universities of the US (17 times), Mexico, Argentina, Australia and Europe, and has been awarded a fellowship at five Institutes for Advanced Study (Stanford, Berlin, Uppsala, Wassenaar and Budapest). He has published thirty books, most of them in English, and more than two hundred academic articles. His most important books include: System and Function (1974), Sociological Dilemmas (1979), Robert Merton: An Intellectual Profile (1986) published also in Chinese, Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming. (1991), The Sociology of Social Change (1993) published also in Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese, Trust: A Sociological Theory (1999), published also in Chinese and Russian, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (co-authored 2005). The textbook Sociology: analysis of society, which also came out in Russian is used at classes of sociology at all Polish universities, and became a nationwide bestseller. The new extended and revised edition has just come out in Poland (2012).