Richard Sennett, born in 1943, studied sociology and history at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. After completing his doctoral degree (1964), he performed research and taught at Harvard, Yale, and universities in Rome and Washington. He currently teaches at London School of Economics. His main areas of research are cities, work, and other topics in cultural sociology. Sennett is one of the best known contemporary social theoreticians. He published a number of books dealing with cultural history, including Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1985), The Corrosion of Character (1998), Respect in a World of Inequality (2002), and most recently The Culture of the New Capitalism (2005). In 1998 Richard Sennett was awarded the Premio Amalfi by the Italian Society for Sociology, and in 2006 he received the Hegel Prize from the city of Stuttgart.

Richard Sennett crosses the borders between the humanities, sociology, and architecture. He has visited Berlin often and has critically studied the new architecture in the city since re-unification. In his lecture Sennett will refer to the new buildings in Berlin.

This event is being organized by the Alumni Organization of the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature of Freie Universität Berlin e. V.