ProfessorStephen Mennell

Stephen MENNELL MA LittD(Cantab.), DrSocSc (Amsterdam), FRHistS, has been Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin since 1993. With his wife Barbara, he founded UCD Press (www.ucdpress.ie) as a collaborative initiative with the university in 1995; he served as chairman of its Editorial Committee from 1995 to 2006, and is still actively involved as a member of both the Editorial and Management Committees. In 1998-9 he led the team that secured Irish government and private funding to build the Institute for the Study of Social Change (now the Geary Institute - http://geary.ucd.ie), and from 1999 to 2002 was its founder Director. Previously, he held posts at the University of Exeter, UK (1967-90) and was then head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University, Australia (1990-3). He was a member of the newly founded Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (www.irchss.ie) 2000-2.Born in 1944, he was educated in local authority grammar schools in Yorkshire. He read economics at Cambridge (BA 1966, MA 1970), where he was a Scholar of St Catharine's College. In 1966-7 he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, where he gained a good grounding in sociology, social psychology and anthropology in the then Department of Social Relations. In 1985, he received the degree of Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen (Doctor of Social Sciences) from the University of Amsterdam. In 1987-8 he was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar, and in 2004 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, KNAW). The same year, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters (LittD) by the University of Cambridge for his published work over three decades. For the year 2006-7 he was awarded a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship, and appointed a Visiting Scholar at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His book All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Blackwells, 1985; rev. ed. University of Illinois Press, 1996) was the first English-language book to win the Grand prix internationale de littérature gastronomique, and the French translation (Français et anglais à table, Flammarion, 1987) won the Prix Marco Polo. This book helped to establish the now internationally thriving research area of the sociology of food and eating. Stephen Mennell has played a leading role in bringing the work of Norbert Elias to a wide international intellectual audience, through his own book Norbert Elias: Civilisation and the Human Self-Image (Blackwells, 1989; rev. ed. UCD Press, 1998), through his translations of Elias's What is Sociology? (1978) and The Germans (1996), and through selections of Elias's writings edited for University of Chicago Press and Blackwells. His most recent book is a study of American history in the light of Elias's theory, The American Civilising Process (Polity Press, 2007). Professor Mennell is one of the three members of the board of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam - Elias's executors - and edits its international research newsletter Figurations. He is also General Editor of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English, which are being published by UCD Press in 18 volumes from 2006 to 2012. He has long had an interest in very long-term processes in the development of human society, and is an associate of the New Global History network based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.His other books (alone and in collaboration) include: Sociological Theory: Uses and Unities (1974, 1980); Leisure, Culture and Local Government (1976); Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution and Society (1980); The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (1993); The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilisation (1996). He has also published numerous journal articles and chapters in edited books. He has been an Associate Editor of Theory, Culture and Society since 1989, Editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology 2002-6, and is an editor of the journal Food and History based in Tours, France.