Robert Wuthnow

American sociologist (born 1946)

Robert John Wuthnow (born 1946) is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, where he is also the former chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Wuthnow was born in Kansas in 1946. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Kansas in 1968 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. His dissertation was Consciousness and the Transformation of Society. While at Berkeley, Wuthnow worked closely with Charles Glock, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah, Guy Swanson, and Gertrude Selznick. Wuthnow's first years at Berkeley were during the widespread protests on campus around the US, which ultimately inspired his dissertation. Glock and Bellah received a grant to study the symbolic—especially the religious—dimensions of the counter culture movement from the Institute for Religion and Social Change. This four year project resulted in the edited volume The New Religious Consciousness in 1976. Wuthnow realized that the counter culture movements were just the most prominent evidence of deeper changes in American culture and used data from the project to argue this in his dissertation, eventually published as The Consciousness Reformation in 1976. After a couple years as an instructor at the University of Arizona from 1974 to 1976, when he took position as assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University where he is currently. Wuthnow has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. His current research and teaching focuses on social change, the sociology of belonging, community, rural sociology, religion and politics, and theory. Wuthnow is editor of The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion and received the first Tufts University Civic Engagement Prize in 2007. In 2009, Wuthnow received the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research from the board of directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013.