Noted Harvard scholar on issues of race and of slavery to lecture Nov. 2

Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a highly regarded scholar on the institution of slavery and the roots of racism and poverty, will present a University Lecture Friday, Nov. 2, at 4:30 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall.

The title of Patterson's lecture is "Slavery and the Problem of Continuity," and it is free and open to the public.

Patterson received his B.Sc. in economics from London University and went on to take a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics in 1965. After faculty appointments at the London School of Economics and the University of the West Indies, he moved to Harvard in 1969-70 and was appointed professor the following year.

He is the author of eight books and several book-length government reports on urban poverty, prepared while he was special adviser to Prime Minister Michael Manly of Jamaica during the 1970s. He examined slavery as a worldwide institution in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, which, in 1983, was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association (The Sorokin Prize). Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, the first of a two-volume historical sociology, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1991. He currently is at work on the second volume.

Over the past few years, Patterson also has explored the intersecting problems of race, gender and socioeconomic change in America with reference to African Americans. He has completed two volumes of a trilogy about this intersection: Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, published in 1988, and The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis, published in 1997.

Patterson also is the author of three novels, The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins and Die the Long Day, a number of anthologized short stories and numerous reviews and critical essays. Among his honors are the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the best scholarly work on the subject of pluralism, the UCLA Medal and the Order of Distinction of the Government of Jamaica. And he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.