Center for Political Studies
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
P.O. Box 1248
Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248

Voice: (734) 763-1348
Fax: (734) 764-3341

Miller Converse Lecture Series

The series is the University of Michigan's preeminent lecture series on American Electoral Politics. The Series honors the legacy of CPS Founder Warren Miller and former CPS Director Philip Converse. You can view a list of previous speakers and copies of papers. The series is supported by donations from students, friends and former colleagues. To support this effort please visit our Invest section.

2008 Miller Converse Lecture

Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Time: 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Location: 6050 ISR
Speaker: Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard
Topic: "American Grace: The Changing Role of Religion in American Civic Life"

Our speaker this year is Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. He is also Visiting Professor and Director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, one of the world's highest accolades for a political scientist.

He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber." Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.