Which books inspired you to become an academic? That’s the question we’re asking social scientists across the world in our weekly academic inspiration feature.
As well as browsing the accounts below, you can also search by the discipline.
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The books that inspired Will Lamb: “The first book to pique my interest in linguistics and Celtic languages was The Story of English (MacCrum, Cran and MacNeil). There was a small section on Scotland, and I was fascinated that Scottish Gaelic culture, with its rich oral tradition, could still be found in Nova Scotia, which was not too far away from my home in Baltimore”
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The books that inspired Natalya Vince: “Domination and the Arts of Resistance helped me think about the complex nature of encounters between ‘the powerful’ and ‘the powerless’ in Algeria”
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The books that inspired Sumantra Bose: “Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth touched a chord with both my national and personal background”
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The books that inspired Jannis Kallinikos: “Gregory Bateson’s essay ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’ is one of the most lucid texts in the social sciences”
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The books that inspired Tim Leunig: “I wanted to study the exciting stuff, the grand strategies of war and peace…I took economic history very much against my will”
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The books that inspired Simon Griffiths: “In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wants to turn his reader’s head, to refocus their attention on aspects of the world that they’d previously neglected”
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The books that inspired Richard Hyman: “As an act of provocation I chose the Marx-Engels selected works as a school prize”
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The books that inspired Conor Gearty: “Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics had such a dramatic impact on me that I tried to dump law and read politics”
Listen to Conor speak more about his early academic life, the book Cannibalism and Common Law and why it’s liberating to admit some books are just plain boring
[jwplayer file=”http://media.rawvoice.com/lse_lsereviewofbooksblog/richmedia.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooksblog/20120629_LSERB_InspirationSeries_ConorGearty.mp3″]
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The books that inspired Henrietta Moore: “A nineteenth century novel is a good story… the details are frequently overwhelming, not unlike doing ethnographic fieldwork”
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The books that inspired Dom Watt: “Lewis Carroll’s linguistic inventiveness fascinated me”
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The books that inspired Emmanuelle Tulle: “Sociology can be as engrossing as art, it can produce documents which explain what previously would have been seen as inexplicable”
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The books that inspired Ron Johnston: “I had no intention of becoming an ‘electoral geographer’, but David Butler and Donald Stokes’ Political Change in Britain grabbed my attention”
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The books that inspired Lewis Baston: “In David Butler’s British General Election series, one can see the moments where the tide of history turned”
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The books that inspired Melanie Simms: “The contributions of Sidney and Beatrice Webb as social scientists cannot be under-estimated”.
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The books that inspired Imani Perry: “Whitewashing Race by Michael K. Brown has a human sensitivity that is often lacking when we talk about race and power”.
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The books that inspired Sally Munt: “Judith Butler defined a whole generation of feminist and queer activists/intellectuals.”
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The books that inspired Arjun Appadurai: “I expect Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to be my companion for many more years to come”.
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The books that inspired Harry Goulbourne: “Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks suggested that I attended to the question of who I was”.
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The books that inspired Raewyn Connell: “Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate had the energy and passion of the liberation movement”.
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The books that inspired Elinor Ostrom: “Lasswell and Kaplan’s Power and Society broadened my perspective on individual choice and behaviour in a way that was very instrumental”.
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