Craig Calhoun is University Professor at New York University with Professorships in the departments of Sociology and Media, Culture, and Communications. At NYU he also directs the Institute for Public Knowledge. He is the President of the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn. Under his leadership, the SSRC has initiated major projects on global security and cooperation, gender and conflict, digital media and learning, the public communication of social science knowledge, the privatization of risk, religion and the public sphere, humanitarian emergences, HIV/AIDS, and a range of other issues. It has also increased the number of fellowships it offers annually.

 

Calhoun has edited several books for the SSRC including most recently The Public Mission of the Research University (with Diana Rhoten, Columbia 2010), Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science (Columbia 2010), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (with J. VanAntwerpen and M. Warner, Harvard 2009), Sociology in America (Chicago 2007), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (with F. Cooper and K. Moore, New Press 2006), and Understanding 9/11 (with P. Price and A. Timmer, New Press 2002).

 

As an individual scholar Calhoun has done research on a variety of themes in historical sociology, the study of social movements and political participation, and social theory including studies of universities and the social sciences. His most recent books include Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge 2007) and The Roots of Radicalism (Chicago, forthcoming). Among his best known earlier books are Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Problem of Specificity (Blackwell, 1995) and Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994).

 

Calhoun received his doctorate from Oxford University. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 19 years, serving also as Dean of the Graduate School and Director of the University Center for International Studies. He has also taught at Columbia University and as a visiting professor in China, Eritrea, France, Norway, and Sudan. In addition to leading the SSRC, he is University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and director of its Institute for Public Knowledge. He has been a Council member, Chair of three sections, and Member or Chair of Program, Publications and International Sociology committees in the ASA and editor of its journal Sociological Theory; Program Chair of the SSHA; member of the Executive Committee of the International Social Science Council; Board Member of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Center for Transcultural Studies, the New School for Social Research, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the Harvard University Board of Overseers, the Fondation Dogan and the Fondation Bourdieu. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has received a range of prizes and an honorary doctorate.

 

On Thanksgiving Day 2011 the Council of the London School of Economics and Political Science named Craig the next Director. He will start 1 September 2012.