Orlando Patterson
Professor Orlando
the
Honourable
Patterson a Jamaican historical and cultural sociologist whose work has shed light on contemporary racial and ethnic issues, explored the historical relations between slavery and freedom and examined the problems of development in Jamaica with special reference to the urban poor and educational reform. is
Professor Patterson has held faculty appointments at his alma maters, The UWI, and The London School of Economics, and is currently the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He has authored many academic papers, seven major academic books and three novels. His academic works include The Sociology of Slavery: Black Slave Society in Jamaica 1655- 1838 (republished 2022) Slavery and Social Death (1982) which received the highest scholarly award of the American Sociological Association; Freedom in the Making of Western Culture which won the American National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1991; The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (2015), and The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, 2019, A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and PROSE award winner for Professional and Scholarly excellence from the Association of American Publishers. His works of fiction are The Children of Sisyphus (1964); An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972). A biography, co-authored with Columbia University Professor David Scott, will appear in 2023. In service to the public, Professor Patterson was appointed Special Advisor for Social Policy and Development to Prime Minister Michael Manley, serving from 1972-1979; he was appointed Chair of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission in the Office of Prime Minister Andrew Holness from 2020 to 2021, and Chair of the Commission for the Transformation of Technical and Vocational Education in Jamaica from 2021 to the present. He has been called twice to the US White House to advise American presidents—in 1975 by President Gerald Ford on the questions of race, ethnicity and identity formation in America, and in 2015 by President Barack Obama on the problem of police brutality and the victimisation of black American youth. He was a founding member of ‘Cultural Survival’ a leading advocacy group for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas, and a Board member of ‘Freedom House’, a major civic organisation promoting freedom and democracy globally. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1978, is an Ernest W. Burgess Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990.
Presentation of Graduates 2022 | 85
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator