"Claudio Lomnitz's scholarly and intellectual significance stems from his brilliant historical-anthropological analysis of political culture and the study of the emergence of nation states and national ideology," explains the cultural and social anthropologist Stephanie Schütze. His ability to understand political cultures in national contexts, based on local and regional contexts from his historical and anthropological studies, makes his theoretical and methodological approach unique. Lomnitz's work is also characterized by a high degree of compatibility with social science research on the transformation of state and nation as well as on transnational processes between the USA and Mexico.

Claudio Lomnitz majored in anthropology at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa in Mexico City, and earned his doctorate at Stanford University in 1987. Subsequently he taught and did research in various locations including at New York University, El Colegio de México, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, the University of Chicago, and The New School in New York. His main areas of research are the history, politics, and culture of Latin America, particularly Mexico. In addition to his academic work, Lomnitz writes regularly for the press, namely La Jornada, a daily newspaper in Mexico City, and Nexos, and he has written a historical play. His most recent work, La Gran Familia, will be performed by Mexico's National Theater Company at the Festival Internacional Cervantino in 2018 in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Every year the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awards up to one hundred Humboldt Research Awards to researchers whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. As part of the award, they are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. The stay may be divided up into blocks. The nominations for the award are submitted by established researchers in Germany.