The National Institute of Social Sciences is delighted to announce the 2021 Honorees for its Gold Honor Medal for distinguished service to society and humanity.
This year we honor three accomplished scholars who have not only made extraordinary contributions to their own academic disciplines but also contributed to and shaped broader cultural conversations about history, justice, and equity that have resonated far beyond the academy. They are each in their own way masterful communicators who have helped us better understand our place in history and our obligations to each other.
The National Institute will celebrate these Honorees at the 107th Annual Gold Medal Gala, which, resuming recent tradition, will be held in person in New York City on Thursday, December 2, 2021. We hope you will be able to join us to honor these extraordinary individuals and their accomplishments.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He teaches philosophy at New York University in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Law School. Earlier, he taught at Princeton, Harvard, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Cambridge and the University of Ghana. He grew up in Ghana and was educated at Cambridge, where he took undergraduate and doctoral degrees in philosophy. He has written widely in philosophy of mind and language, ethics and political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, of culture and of the social sciences; as well as in literary studies, where his focus has been on African and African-American literature.
In February 2012, President Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal. In 1992, he published the prize-winning In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. His recent publications include: Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2006) and Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Harvard, 2014) and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (Norton, 2018).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates’s most recent books are Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films, most recently The Black Church on PBS and Black Art: In the Absence of Light for HBO. Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, is now in its seventh season on PBS.
He is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, most recently a Litt.D. from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his B.A. in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is also an Honorary Fellow. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and The Studio Museum of Harlem.
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher who has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of countries. He is currently Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. Until 2004 he was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, and the International Economic Association. His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
Amartya Sen’s awards include Bharat Ratna (India); Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur (France); the National Humanities Medal (USA); Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Brazil); Honorary Companion of Honour (UK); Aztec Eagle (Mexico); Edinburgh Medal (UK); the George Marshall Award (USA); the Eisenhower Medal (USA); and the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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One of the nation’s oldest honorary societies, the National Institute of Social Sciences has presented Gold Medals each year to men and women whose lives have manifested the highest achievements and who have made significant contributions to society and to humanity. This year’s three honorees joined a distinguished, diverse pantheon of honorees that stretches back to 1913.
Recent Gold Medal Honorees include Max Stier, Darren Walker, and Judy Woodruff (2020); Paul Edward Farmer and Peter Gelb (2019); Daniel Kahneman, Geraldine Kunstadter, and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (2018); Ron Chernow, Robert Shiller, and Michael Sovern (2017); Pauline Newman, Richard L. Ottinger, and Robert Putnam, (2016); John Bogle, Paul Krugman, and Michelle Kwan (2015); and Eric Foner, Philippe Petit, and Edward O. Wilson (2014).
Previous Gold Medal Honorees, 1913-2020
About the National Institute of Social Sciences
Established in 1912, the National Institute of Social Sciences is a voluntary association of public-spirited citizens who explore issues of urgent and lasting concern. One of the nation’s oldest honorary societies, the National Institute sponsors speeches, discussions, and events that encourage balanced, non-partisan debate and discussion; celebrates distinguished Americans and world leaders who have contributed at the highest level to the welfare and improvement of society; and provides financial support to emerging scholars who are conducting research in the social sciences.