Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, having retired from active teaching in May 2018. Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006 Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for "deepening our understanding of community in America.” He has received twenty-one honorary degrees from eight countries, including in 2018, the University of Oxford.
Bob has written fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, including Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, both among the most cited (and bestselling) social science works in the last half century. His most recent bestsellers are Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, which described the growing class gap among American youth, and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, a study of broad 20th century American economic, social, political, and cultural trends.
Before coming to Harvard in 1979, Bob taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the US National Security Council. At Harvard he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He co-founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners (including President Obama) to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal. His counsel has been sought by national and grassroots leaders on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic, including Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, British Prime Ministers Blair, Brown, and Cameron, Irish Taoiseach O'Hearn, Finnish President Niinistö and Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon. At Harvard Bob has taught international relations, comparative politics, and American politics, including for more than two decades a small seminar “Community in America” whose alumni have gone on to distinguished careers in local and national politics, civil society, and public life. Over the last three decades he has spoken to more than one thousand citizen groups from coast to coast and around the world, aiming to rally support for democratic renewal. In 2023 Putnam’s life and work were chronicled in the prize-winning Netflix documentary film “Join or Die.”