Kenneth Prewitt


Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he is also director of the Scholarly Knowledge Project. He was Director of the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001.

Biography

He was born March 16, 1936, in Alton, IL. He received a B.A.in 1958 from Southern Methodist University; a M.A. in 1959 from Washington University, and a 1963 Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University with a thesis "Career patterns and role-orientations: an inquiry into the political behavior of city councilmen" and was a Danforth Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School.
He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago in 1965, rising to the rank of first Associate and then Full Professor. From 1998 to 2000 he was the Director of the Census Bureau from 1998-2001 and Director of the National Opinion Research Center. He has also served as president of the Social Science Research Council, as senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and as Dean of the Graduate School at the New School University. Since 2015, he has been the president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Prewitt has two children by his first marriage, and is now married to Susan Vogel, an art historian and film-maker.

Academic Work

Honors

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a Lifetime Career Award from the American Political Science Association,. He also has received honorary degrees from Southern Methodist University and from Carnegie Mellon University and.

Publications

Books

He has also published 100 articles and book chapters