Elinor Ostrom Statue Unveiled on IU Campus


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The statue of Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Jim Krause

edited by RODNEY MARGISON

A statue of Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, was dedicated November 12 on the Indiana University–Bloomington campus. It is the first statue of a woman to be erected at IU–Bloomington and was commissioned by the university as part of its Bicentennial Bridging the Visibility Gap project. The statue is located outside Woodburn Hall, home to the school’s political science department, in an area that has been dedicated as the Ostrom Commons.

Ostrom was a pioneering social scientist and one of the world’s leading scholars on the management of common pool resources. In 1973, she co-founded with her husband, Vincent, the Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU.

Ostrom died from pancreatic cancer in 2012 at the age of 78.

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