Margaret Archer

Who is Margaret Archer?

Margaret Scotford Archer spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick, UK, where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She is now a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. In April 2014, Professor Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

She studied at the University of London, graduating B.Sc. in 1964 and Ph.D. in 1967 with a thesis on The Educational Aspirations of English Working Class Parents. She was a lecturer at the University of Reading from 1966 to 1973.

She is one of the most influential theorists in the critical realist tradition. At the 12th World Congress of Sociology, she was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association, is a founder member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.