Biography of Emilio Lamo de Espinosa
- He holds a PhD by the Universidad Complutense, a PhD in Sociology by the University of California-UCSB (1979), where he continued his studies in the 70s and has been a Visiting Professor. Sociology Professor at the Universidad Complutense since 1982.
- He was in charge of reforming Spanish universities during Felipe González’s first socialist government (1982-1987), receiving the Grand Cross of Alfonso X el Sabio for this work, and he was appointed an Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques for his services to French culture.
- For almost ten years (1992-2002) he was the director of the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset, the largest centre for postgraduate social science studies in Spain. From 2002 to 2005, he was Director of the foundation of the Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos, the first Spanish think tank for international studies. From 2007 to 2010 he was President of the Federación Española de Sociología, of which he is an Honourable Member.
- He is a PhD Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Salamanca, received the Otto Habsburg Prize in 2014, is a Numerary Academic of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he is a regular collaborator with the press, and is a trustee or consultant with various foundations: Fundación Consejo España-Estados Unidos (of which he is currently the Vice-president), Fundación Real Instituto Elcano, Fundación Ortega y Gasset-Marañón, Fundación Carolina, Fundación Transición Política Española, Fundación Fernando Pombo, Fundación Príncipe de Girona and Fundación Botín. He is also an editorial board member of the Revista Internacional de Transparencia e Integridad.
- Significant publications: twenty-two books published, over one hundred scientific monographs, and almost 400 press or dissemination articles, and 6 six-year research projects recognised. His first publications addressed recovering Spain’s heterodox intellectual history (Política y Filosofía en Julián Besteiro, 1973), and Marxist criticism (Teoría de la reificación. De Marx a la Escuela de Frankfurt, 1981), before writing about the sociology of law and social deviation (Delitos sin víctimas, 1989) and, above all, about the sociology of knowledge and of science (La sociedad reflexiva, 1990; La sociología del conocimiento y de la ciencia, 1994), his main field of research. He won the Jovellanos International Essay Prize for his work Sociedades de cultura y sociedades de ciencia (1996). More recently he has studied the emerging transnational society and its governance (Bajo puertas de fuego. El nuevo desorden internacional, 2004; publ. Europa después de Europa, 2010). He is also the author, together with Salvador Giner and Cristóbal Torres, of the most widely used Diccionario de Sociología (Sociology Dictionary) in Spanish (Alianza Editorial, 2nd edition, 2007). He has supervised fourteen doctoral theses, four of which received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award.