Retirement of Professor Stephen J. Mennell
Professor Stephen Mennell (right) with Professor Anne Fuchs, UCD; and
Professor Nicholas Canny, President of the Royal Irish Academy.
Stephen made an enormous contribution to the School, the Colleges of Human Sciences and Arts and Celtic Studies, and to the University as a whole. He was part of the team that was successful in obtaining the grant that enabled the Geary Institute (originally the Institute for the Study of Social Change which may have reflected Stephen’s interest in long-term historical change). He became Director of the new Institute in 1999 and left to take up a sabbatical in 2002. While he served on numerous university committees, his main legacy will be the contribution he made to help create UCD Press with his wife Barbara. Starting with more encouragement than funding, and facing stiff opposition, UCD Press has become the leading academic publisher in Ireland.
However, it has been in the field of sociology that Stephen has made his greatest contribution. His PhD was published as All Manners of Food and Eating. It won two international awards. It established him immediately as the dominant figure in the sociology of food and eating. Although a very sophisticated scholarly work, it was founded on a rather simple question: why did the English become more obsessed with the health costs and benefits of food while the French became passionate about the pleasures of eating? His other great work, The American Civilizing Process again asked a simple question: what was peculiar about the way in which the Americans became civilised and does this explain their difference from Europeans? However, it is probably through his work in promoting and developing the work of the great sociologist Norbert Elias that Stephen has achieved his international reputation. His book Norbert Elias was the first to synthesise Elias’s work, something that he himself had never achieved or indeed bothered to do so. Although there are numerous Eliasian scholars around the world, none have tried or bothered to try to emulate this wonderful encapsulation of a very complex writer.
Stephen continues to work with the Elias Foundation: he is one of three trustees. He continues to edit the Foundation’s newsletter Figurations. He continues to write, publish and travel the world. He is working on a new book, a comparative-historical study of military training. He is one of the organisers of a major international conference Globalization and Civilization in International Relations to be held in UCD 9–10 April 2010.
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