Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, will be the first speaker in the newly formed Jaya Lectures Series on the UT Dallas campus.

Sen is a highly acclaimed economist, writer and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to welfare economics. Regarded as one of the world's foremost thinkers, Sen was featured on Time magazine’s list of “World's 50 Most Influential People Who Matter” and was named the “Third Most Influential Thought Leader of 2014” by Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.

His talk — "Women: Survival and Empowerment" — will be at 7 p.m. Friday in the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building lecture hall.

Sen helped create the United Nations Human Development Index and is best known for his work on famine, poverty and the role of freedom as a means for development. He was the first person to measure gendercide. In 1990, he determined that 100 million women were demographically “missing” in the world due to vicious discriminatory practices. He has long championed education for girls and economic empowerment of women — as both a moral right and a tool for development.

Currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, Sen has also worked as a professor at the London School of Economics and at Oxford University. His research has encompassed economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, development economics, public health and gender studies. 

Tickets for the talk are free for students, faculty and staff, and $30 for non-UT Dallas attendees. Tickets may be purchased online.

The Jaya Lecture Series at UT Dallas was made possible by Lekha Singh, photographer and producer of Beyond Right & Wrong, a documentary that asks how societies recover from devastating conflict, and examines whether survivors can live beside someone who was once their enemy. The film examines how victims and perpetrators work together to rebuild their lives, revealing the intersections of justice and forgiveness as survivors heal from tragedy. The lecture series is named after Singh’s grandmother, who was one of the first female Indian doctors.

This event is co-hosted by the UT Dallas Asia Center and the School of Economic, Political & Policy Sciences Gendercide Awareness Project, and the South Asia Democracy Watch.