Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies

Fredrik Engelstad (2006/2007)

Fredrik Engelstad is the director of the Institute for Social Research, and professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. With a background in sociology, his main fields of interest are power, social justice and sociology of culture and literature. He was part of the core group of the large-scale Norwegian Power and Democracy Study 1998-2003 and member of the Committee on Nordic Democracy of the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2004. He was Visiting Wigeland Professor at the University of Chicago in 1996, and has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University, UCLA, University of California Berkeley, and Humboldt University of Berlin.

Engelstad offered two courses at Northwestern, both with a comparative focus on Europe, (particularly Northern Europe) and the United States. The graduate-level course “Social Elite, Power and Democracy” considered variations in the position of social and political elites, both over time and between countries. The undergraduate course “Public Policy, Work and Economic Life” focused on pertinent differences across the Atlantic concerning economic organization and relationships between politics and the economy. Engelstad gave the Buffett Lecture in International Studies: Citizen Power and the Quality of Democracy.