Viviana Zelizer

A specialist in culture and economic processes, Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing value of children, the place of money in social life, and the economics of intimacy.  A collection of her essays appears in Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010). In 2017 Princeton University Press published a new edition of her book The Social Meaning of Money, with a preface by Nigel Dodd and Columbia University Press published a new edition of Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, with a preface by Kieran Healy.  Her most recent book is Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (Princeton University Press, 2017) co-edited with Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry. Her books and articles have been translated into multiple languages She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 2019, she received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from Sciences Po University in Paris and in 2020 she was an inaugural recipient of the Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Career Award from the Comparative Historical Section of the American Sociological Association.

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