Keynote Speaker: Robert Putnam

Robert Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses.

He is also a visiting professor and director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). 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. Raised in a small Midwestern town and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford and Yale, he has served as dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He has written a dozen books, all translated into 17 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.

He founded the Saguaro Seminar, which brings together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop ideas for civic renewal.

He is working on three major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life and (3) practical strategies for civic renewal in the United States in the context of immigration and social and ethnic diversity.