Putnam was awarded the Skytte Prize in 2006, the highest honor in the field of political science, the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2013 for "deepening our understanding of community in America," and the Karl Deutsch Award for interdisciplinary research by the International Political Science Association in 2018.
He has earned 18 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in eight different nations, including Oxford in 2018.
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community are two of the most cited (and best-selling) social science books from the past fifty years, respectively, and are among the fifteen books that Putnam has written and had translated into twenty different languages.
The Woodrow Wilson Prize was given to American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, a book that David Campbell and I co-authored in 2011. His best-selling book from 2015, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, detailed the widening wealth inequality among young Americans.
Putnam worked for the US National Security Council and taught at the University of Michigan before moving to Harvard in 1979. He has held the positions of Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard.
He was a founding member of the Saguaro Seminar, which brought together eminent scholars and practitioners (such as President Obama) to provide practical suggestions for civic regeneration.
National and grassroots leaders from all sides of the political spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic have consulted him, including Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, Prime Ministers Blair, and Cameron, as well as leaders from Ireland, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, and other countries.
He has collaborated closely with thousands of grassroots leaders in many small towns from coast to coast over the past few decades. With his wife Rosemary, he splits his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire. In an increasingly fractured society, writer Shaylyn Romney Garrett has devoted her life to the search for community, connection, and healing.
She is the author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which features illuminating portrayals of religious groups from all around the country. She is a founder supporter of the Weave: The Social Fabric Project program of the Aspen Institute and blogs at Project Reconnect about her own personal return to the community.
As a social entrepreneur, Shaylyn has also enjoyed success. She co-founded Think Unlimited, a nonprofit organization striving to spur social innovation in the Middle East, with her husband James Garrett.
She collaborated with Queen Rania Al-Abdullah while she was a resident in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for six years to provide a unique Arabic language curriculum on creativity and critical thinking to Jordanian public schools. The New York Times, FastCompany, LinkedIn, Harvard Business Review, and Arab Investor have all featured Shaylyn's work.
She received the renowned Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship in 2011 and finished in the top three in the international Echoing Green Competition. Shaylyn is a former Peace Corps volunteer who has a BA magna cum laude in government from Harvard University.
She is a permaculturalist who enjoys working in the dirt and views strong human societies as having healthy soils as a model. She resides in Southern Utah's stunning red rock desert with her husband James, their children Sophie and Aeon, and their devoted dog Dewey.
