Bruce Mazlish

Professor Bruce Mazlish was a Professor Emeritus of MIT. His areas of interest and expertise were Western intellectual and cultural history, with a special nod to history of science and technology, the culture of capitalism, the nature of modernity, and history of the social sciences. He was also an authority on historical methodology, and pioneered especially in the interdisciplinary field of psychohistory. He spearheaded an initiative to conceptualize the New Global History, both writing in and organizing the field. In the course of his career he received a number of significant honors. He was a recipient of an SSRC Faculty Fellowship and made a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1972-73). In 1986-87 he was awarded the Toynbee Prize, an international award in social science (the next awardee was George Kennan, followed among others by Ralf Dahrendorf, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and more recently Albert Hirschman). In addition to his writing and teaching, Mazlish served on the Board of Trustees of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, 1992-2007 (serving as President from 1997-2006), on the Scholars Council for the Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress, 2000-2003, and on the governing board of the Rockefeller Archives Center, 1999-2005.