Lester Kurtz

Lester Kurtz is professor of public sociology at George Mason University, currently teaching at its campus in Korea; he teaches courses on violence and nonviolence, peace and conflict, social movements, comparative sociology of religion, and global social thought. Kurtz holds a Master's in Religion from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was previously director of Religious Studies at the University of Texas-Austin.

He is the editor-in-chief of a 3-volume Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict (Elsevier, 2008; a 4-volume third edition is now in progress), and The Warrior and the Pacifist: Competing Themes in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Routledge, 2018); he is co-editor with Mariam M. Kurtz of the 2-volume Women, War and Violence: Typography, Resistance and Hope (Praeger, 2015), and with Lee A. Smithey, The Paradox of Repression and Nonviolent Movements (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2018), Nonviolent Civil Resistance (with Sharon Erikson Nepstad, Emerald, 2012; paperback, 2016), Nonviolent Social Movements (with Stephen Zunes, Blackwell, 1999),The Web of Violence (with Jennifer Turpin, U. of Illinois Press, 1997) and Third World Peace Perspectives (with Shu-ju Ada Cheng). He is author of many books and articles including Gods in the Global Village (Sage; translated into Chinese by Beijing University Press), The Nuclear Cage (Prentice-Hall) and The Politics of Heresy (U. of California Press), which received the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Book Award. He is currently working on a book on Gods and Bombs: Religion and the Rhetoric of Violence and a project on nonwestern social theory that attempts to transcend the Euro-American foundations of the modern social sciences and tap the vast streams of knowledge from Asian, African, and Indigenous American cultures over the millennia.

Dr. Kurtz is the past chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Association as well as the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section of the American Sociological Association, which awarded him its Robin Williams Distinguished Career Award in 2005. In 2014 he was given the Lester F. Ward Distinguished Contribution to Applied and Clinical Sociology Award by the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology He has lectured in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America and taught as a visiting professor at the European Peace University, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Delhi University in India, and Tunghai University in Taiwan. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Nanjing Massacre History and International Peace in Nanjing, Republic of China. He is the husband of Dr. Mariam Kurtz and they have two daughters – Amina and Amani – and a son, Brian, who are with them in South Korea. His older daughter, Patience, lives in Chicago.

His Curriculum Vita is available online as are many of his publications.

Degrees

• PhD, Sociology, University of Chicago
• MAR, Religion, Yale University
• BA, Sociology and Religion, Westmar College