Two new honorary doctors at Uppsala University’s Faculty of Social Sciences

Ash Amin is a professor of geography at the University of Cambridge, where he holds the 1931 Chair in Geography. One of the most highly regarded geographers and social scientists of our day, he is a cosmopolitan researcher with in-depth knowledge of South Asia and Africa. His thinking and research are distinguished by global commitment. He is internationally renowned for his work on how regional and urban societies are materially constituted and how globalisation can be analysed in terms of everyday processes that fundamentally transform local communities and their meaning-bearing elements as well. His research on spatial change processes in a global context thus has an immediate relevance to our scope for also understanding economic, social and political processes of change. His research on race issues and multiculturalism has come to influence thinking and policy formation on ethnic diversity.

Mary Poovey is a professor of English and Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University. She began her career as a literary historian but, in her work over the past 20 years, she has increasingly approached the subject of economic history. She has a well-defined interdisciplinary profile. Specifically, she has focused on issues relating to the emergence of modern social sciences in the period 1700–1900 and how they relate to new ways of seeing knowledge, the importance of the novel for notions of the role of credit and money in society, and the role of thinking about the future in the subject of economic development. She is currently completing a historical presentation of modelling and the triumphal progress of mathematical models in economics and economic policy: The Modern Way of Knowing: Studies in the History of Financial Modeling. All Poovey’s works contain original ideas with a bearing on several academic disciplines. Her groundbreaking A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998) has been of crucial importance in research on the history of modern social sciences.