Liah Greenfeld

Liah Greenfeld (born 1954) is a professor of Political Science and Sociology and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences at Boston University.

Greenfeld has published on the topics of art, economics, history, language, literature, philosophy, politics, religion and science. Her work concentrates on England/Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia/Soviet Union, and the United States. Her first major work, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992) established Greenfeld as an authority on nationalism.^{[citation needed]} In 2001 she published The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth.

In Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld argues that nationalism was invented in England by 1600. According to Greenfeld, England was “the first nation in the world".

Greenfeld received her doctoral degree from the department of sociology and social anthropology of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982. That fall assumed her first teaching position in the United States as a post-doctoral instructor at the University of Chicago. She held positions of Assistant and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard between 1985 and 1994, and in 1994 joined Boston University as a University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology. At various periods, she has also held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was a recipient of Olin, Earhart and N.R.C. fellowships. Moreover, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.

In 2002, she received the Kagan Prize of the Historical Society for the best book in European History (for The Spirit of Capitalism) and in 2004 was chosen to deliver the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics. In the past five years, her teaching has increasingly concentrated on the mind in the context of culture,^{[citation needed]} which has led to her current interests in neuroscience and the comparative study of creative imagination.

Before she moved with her parents from Russia to Israel in 1972, she was a prodigious violinist, performing on television at the age of 7.^{[citation needed]} When she was 16, she received the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize in poetry (along with a bust of Pushkin). A collection of her poems are published under an alias in Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Works

• Center: Ideas and Institutions. ed. with Michel Martin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1988. ISBN 0-226-30686-0. 
• Different Worlds: A Sociological Study of Taste, Choice and Success in Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989. ISBN 0-521-36064-1. 
• Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1992. ISBN 0-674-60318-4. 
• The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2001. ISBN 0-674-00614-3. 
• Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture. Oxford: Oneworld. 2006. ISBN 1-85168-459-X.