Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, having served as Professor of Sociology and, at various times, Head of Department at Leeds from 1972 until his retirement in 1990. He was formerly of the University of Warsaw until 1968 and the University of Tel Aviv, and held several visiting professorships, in Australia and elsewhere, before coming to Leeds. He is now Professor Emeritus also at the University of Warsaw. Zygmunt Bauman is known throughout the world for works such as "Legislators and Interpreters" (1987), "Modernity and the Holocaust" (1989), "Modernity and Ambivalence" (1991), "Postmodern Ethics" (1993), and "Liquid Modernity" (2000). He is the author of some 21 books in English and of numerous articles and reviews. His reputation, although already well-established by the 1970s in Western Europe and North America as well as throughout the then Eastern Bloc, grew at an especially rapid rate in the late 1980s, and today he is described variously as one of the twentieth century's great social theorists and the world's foremost sociologist of postmodernity. While heading the Department of Sociology, of which he was the first Professor, Bauman brought to the task of running things great qualities of intellectual leadership. Zygmunt Bauman was awarded the Amalfi European Prize in 1990 and the Adorno Prize in 1998.

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