The University of Navarra has awarded honorary degrees to four academics, including to the Navarrese architect Rafael Moneo, who was the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize recipient; English sociologist Margaret S. Archer, the first female president of the International Sociological Association; the Hebrew philologist Ruth Fine, whose work focuses on the intercultural dialogue between Israel and the Hispanic world; and the Oxford University researcher Robert Picard, an expert in economics and media management.

Since 1964, the University of Navarra has awarded honorary degrees to 39 recipients based on their academic and professional trajectory. The current awardees were nominated by the School of Architecture, the Institute for Culture and Society, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the School of Communication. The academic ceremony will take place on June 28, 2019.

Rafael Moneo, born in Tudela (Navarra) in 1937, is considered the most internationally recognized Spanish architect. He earned his architecture degree from the Madrid University School of Architecture in 1961, where he was later a professor (1966-1970). In 1972, he was awarded the Chair of Composition Elements at the Barcelona School of Architecture, ​​returning to the Chair of Composition at the Madrid University School of Architecture in 1980.

In 1976, he traveled to the United States to work at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and taught at the Cooper Union School of Arquitecture. He also taught at Princeton, Lausane and Harvard, where he directed the Department of Architecture. In 1992, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Achievement in the Fine Arts by the Spanish Government.

He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1996, as well as the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize for Architecture, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Gold Medal from France’s Architecture Academy and a Gold Medal from the International Union of Architects. In 2001, he won the Mies van der Rohe Prize, in 2012, the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and, in 2015, the National Architecture Prize.

In Navarra, he was awarded the Prince of Viana Prize in 1993 and also holds an honorary degree from the Public University of Navarra. In addition to teaching at the University of Navarra’s School of Architecture, he also designed the University’s Museum, which was inaugurated in 2015.

Margaret S. Archer: The first female president of the International Sociological Association

Margaret S. Archer (United Kingdom, 1943) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and founding member and current President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. She was also the first female president of the International Sociological Association. She received her doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics and did postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne University. She has been a professor at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University of Reading and the University of Warwick.

Margaret S. Archer’s work is representative of Realistic Social Theory. Her central thesis focuses on the autonomy between culture, structure and social action, three independent, but not isolated, realities, that each possess specific characteristics. This sociological theory offers a framework of understanding for human action capable of answering the question of the capacity that concrete people have, through our decisions, to transform the culture and social structures in which we live. Cambridge University Press has published a collection of her extensive research.

Professor Archer first visited the University of Navarra in 2014, when she gave the inaugural ICS Lecture on Humanities and Social Sciences. Her collaboration continues as a faculty member for the Master of Social Science Research (MICS).

An Israeli professor involved in intercultural dialogue between the Hebrew and Hispanic world

Ruth Viviana Fine, born in Argentina (1957) and of Israeli nationality, has a degree in Latin, Spanish and Latin American Philology from the University of Buenos Aires. She earned her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is a professor of Romance and Latin American Studies. She currently holds the Salomon & Victoria Cohen Chair in Iberian and Latin American Studies, and directs the Institute of Western Cultures and the European Forum.

Specializing in literary theory and narrative from the Spanish Golden Age, especially in the work of Cervantes, she has published more than a hundred studies in editorials and international journals. She has received several prizes, among them, the Award of Excellence granted by the rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2013, she was also awarded the “Orden del Mérito Civil” by the King of Spain for her work in the development of cultural relations between Spain and Israel, and for promoting knowledge of Spanish literature.

She is founder and president of the Israeli Association of Hispanists, vice president of the International Association of Hispanists, and member of the International Association of the Golden Age (Asociación Internacional del Siglo de Oro). In 2016, the Royal Spanish Academy chose her to be a foreign academic due to her international recognition as a Spanish scholar.

Robert G. Picard: Expert in economics and media management

Robert G. Picard was born in 1951 in the United States; he completed a master's degree at California State University and earned his doctorate from the University of Missouri. He is currently a professor at Jönköping International Business School in Sweden, at Tampere University in Finland, and at the Institute of Media and Entertainment at IESE (University of Navarra) in New York, among others.

Until January 2015, he was the Research Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, a researcher at Green Templeton College and a member of the Royal Society of Arts. Since its foundation and until May 2018, he also chaired the World Media Economics and Management Conference, the main international conference for researchers and academics in media economics, and was one of the founders of theEuropean Media Management Association (EMMA), the first European academic association for researchers in this field.

Throughout his career, Picard has received several awards including the Journal of Media Economics Award of Honor and the European Media Management Education Association Award. In 2000, an award that bears his name was established for the best scientific contribution of the year in the field of media economics. He is the author and editor of 32 books and has written more than a hundred academic articles.