Dear RSF:

Please join us on 10/31 in the library at 11:00 for Edwin Amenta’s seminar entitled “Social Movements in the News”.

Professor Amenta is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2005. His research focuses on social policy, social movements and the New Deal. Professor Amenta is known for theorizing the role of political institutions in policymaking, and his recent work includes the development of a newspaper coverage database that allows scholars to test theories of social movement impacts across 34 major social movement organizations. He has written several books and more than 50 articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a book, with Francesca Polletta, on social movements which will utilize that database to be published by the Foundation.

Amenta’s first book, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy, published by Princeton University Press in 1998, won the 1999 Distinguished Book of the year award from the American Sociological Association. His second book, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and, in 2012 he co-edited The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology with Kate Nash and Alan Scott.

Professor Amenta received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1989.