CAMBRIDGE---William Julius Wilson, one of the nation's leading sociologists and authorities on poverty and race relations in America, has been named the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Dean Joseph Nye announced today.

Wilson, currently the Lucy Flower University Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Chicago, will join the Kennedy School faculty in time for the fall 1996 semester and will be part of the Kennedy School's Wiener Center for Social Policy.

Wilson will also be a voting member of the Department of Afro-American Studies, a member of the Advisory Board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, and will hold an affiliation with Harvard's Department of Sociology.

"We are honored to welcome to our faculty one of the most remarkable scholars of our time, said Nye. "Professor Wilson will add immeasurably to the work of the Wiener Center, and will help us make thoughtful, serious contributions to major questions of government and social policy well into the next century.

"It was a very difficult decision to leave the University of Chicago," said Wilson. "However, I am excited about joining the Harvard faculty because of the critical mass of outstanding scholars who are engaged in national debates, and whose scholarly work addresses issues that are on the national public agenda."

"William Julius Wilson's decision to spend the next phase of his career at Harvard puts the Kennedy School, the Department of Afro-American Studies, and the Du Bois Institute in an ideal position to assume a central role in shaping public policy issues involving problems of race and class," said Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies. "For Afro-American Studies, Wilson will be the pivotal person in our social sciences component, complementing the considerable strength we have in cultural studies. This is a great day for Harvard, and a great day for Afro-American Studies!"

Wilson is currently director of the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality at the University of Chicago's I.B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. His works on race relations and the American underclass have received widespread acclaim. He is the author of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy, which was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books published in 1987. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions received the Sydney S. Spivack Award in intergroup relations from the American Sociological Association. He is also author of Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives, and co-author of Through Different Eyes: Black and White Perspectives on American Race Relations. Another major work, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf later this year.

A former chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Wilson held the French-American Foundation's American Studies Chair at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1989-90). He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1981-82). He previously taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award in 1970.

Wilson is past president of the American Sociological Association and the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988, the American Philosophical Society in 1990, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.

Wilson, who was named a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1987, delivered the 1988 Godkin Lecture at the Kennedy School. He has been awarded 22 honorary doctorates.