UCD School of Sociology

Stephen Mennell was Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin from 1993 to 2009, and is now Professor Emeritus. With his wife Barbara he founded UCD Press in 1995, and served as chairman of its Editorial Committee until 2006.  From 1999 to 2002 he was founder Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change (now the Geary Institute). Previously, he held posts at the University of Exeter, UK (1967¿90) and the chair of Sociology at Monash University, Australia (1990¿3).

He read economics at Cambridge (BA 1966, MA 1970), where he was a Scholar of St Catharine¿s College. In 1966¿7 he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, in the then Department of Social Relations. In 1985, he received the degree of Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen (Doctor of Social Sciences) from the University of Amsterdam. In 1987¿8 he was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar. In 2004 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters (LittD) by the University of Cambridge for his published work over three decades. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, KNAW) in 2004, of the Royal Irish Academy in 2009, and of the Academia Europæa in 2011.

Stephen Mennell has played a leading role in bringing the work of Norbert Elias to a wide international intellectual audience. His study of American history in the light of Elias¿s theory, The American Civilising Process, was published by Polity Press in October 2007. His book Norbert Elias: Civilisation and the Human Self-Image (Blackwells, 1989; rev. ed. UCD Press, 1998), was the first full-length study of the work of someone now recognised as one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. Professor Mennell is one of the three members of the board of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam is General Editor of the Collected Works of Elias, being published by UCD Press in 18 volumes.

His earlier book All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Blackwells, 1985; rev. edn University of Illinois Press, 1996) was the first English-language book to win the Grand prix internationale de littérature gastronomique, and the French translation (Français et anglais à table, Flammarion, 1987) won the Prix Marco Polo. This book helped to establish the now internationally thriving research area of the sociology of food and eating.

His other books (alone and in collaboration) include: Sociological Theory: Uses and Unities (1974, 1980); Leisure, Culture and Local Government (1976); Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution and Society (1980); The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (1993); The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilisation (1996), The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection and Norbert Elias on Civilization, Power and Knowledge (both 1998).