Richard Madsen, Professor and Chair
Ph.D. - Harvard, 1977

Areas of Specialization:
Sociology of culture, Sociology of religion, Comparative sociology, Chinese society

Email Address:   rmadsen@ucsd.edu
Phone number:    (858) 534-2779
Office location:  401 Social Science Building

Office Hours

Biography:

Richard Madsen received an MA in Asian studies and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He is currently Professor of Sociology and director of the Council on East Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a co-director of a Ford Foundation project to help revive the academic discipline of sociology in China.

He is the author, or co-author of eleven books on Chinese culture, American culture, and international relations. He has also written scholarly articles on how to compare cultures and how to facilitate dialogue among them. His best known works on American culture are those written with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton: Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995) and The Good Society (New York, Knopf, 1991). These books explore and criticize the culture of individualism and the institutions that sustain it. Habits of the Heart won the LA Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

His books on China include Chen Village under Mao and Deng (co-authored with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger) (Berkeley, UC Press, 1992), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (UC Press, 1984) [winner of the C. Wright Mills Award], Unofficial China (co-edited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz) (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), China and the American Dream (UC Press, 1994), China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (UC Press, 1998), and Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, co-edited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Books on social theory include: Meaning and Modernity, co-edited with William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton (UC Press, 2002) and The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Curriculum Vitae

Classes to be taught in 2007/08:

Spring 2008
SOCD 189 - Special Topics in Comparative-Historical Sociology

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