Barry Schwartz was an American sociologist. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from Temple University (1962), University of Maryland (1964), and University of Pennsylvania (1970), respectively. He taught at the University of Chicago and University of Georgia and was a fellow at the University of Georgia Institute for Behavioral Research (1977–1983), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1987–1988) in Stanford, CA, the National Humanities Center (1992–1993) in Research Triangle, NC, the Smithsonian Museum of National History in Washington, DC (1993), and the University of Georgia Humanities Center (1994). He was also a Davis Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hebrew University (2002) in Jerusalem. In 2000, he received the William A. Owens Award for Outstanding Research and Creativity (University of Georgia); in 2009 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Hebrew University.
From the early 1980s, Schwartz dedicated almost all his research to the problem of collective memory. His work affirms the perspectives of both realism and constructionism. The path of Barry Schwartz’s work runs from interactional social psychology to cognitive sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and collective memory. The last, major, phase cannot be inferred from the first but is inextricably connected to it.