Craig Calhoun is an American sociologist and an advocate of using social science to address issues of public concern. He is president of the Social Science Research Council, University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and Director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge. With Richard Sennett he co-founded NYLON, an interdisciplinary working seminar for graduate students in New York and London who bring ethnographic and historical research to bear on politics, culture, and society. He is the appointed future Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from September 2012 on.
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Calhoun was raised in the American South and Midwest. He studied anthropology and cinema at the University of Southern California, (BA, 1972), anthropology and sociology at Columbia University (MA, 1974), and social anthropology at Manchester University (MA, (Econ.), 1975).He received his doctorate in sociology and modern social and economic history from Oxford University in 1980, a student of J.C. Mitchell, Angus MacIntyre, and R.M. Hartwell. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1977 to 1996. There he was also Dean of the Graduate School and founding Director of the University Center for International Studies. He moved to NYU in 1996 as Chair of the Department of Sociology in a period of major rebuilding. He left for Columbia in 2006 but returned to NYU as Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK). which promotes collaborations among academics from diverse disciplinary backgrounds atnd between academics and working professionals. Calhoun has also taught at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Asmara, University of Khartoum, University of Oslo, and Oxford itself. He was Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol in 2000 and received an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2005.
Dr. Calhoun is married to Pamela DeLargy who is Chief of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) Humanitarian Response Unit (HRU).
Dr. Calhoun is probably best known for broadening the tradition of critical theory and connecting it more closely to empirical social and historical research. His work has ranged widely across cosmopolitanism, culture and communication; humanitarianism, social movements, the impact of technological change; tort law, risk, and business organizations; education; religion; community, nationalism, and other forms of social solidarity; and problems in contemporary globalization and internationalization of social processes. He has worked in China, the Horn of Africa, and Europe.
Since 1999 Calhoun has been President of the Social Science Research Council. At the SSRC Calhoun has emphasized the public contributions of social science. His views are explained in his essay “Towards a More Public Social Science” which first appeared in the SSRC's 2004 "President's Report" and has been translated, reprinted and widely circulated on the web. After September 11th, 2001 he launched an initiative on "Real Time Social Science" which included an essay forum that attracted more than one million readers. This continued with work on the Privatization of Risk, Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences Program, and now Haiti, Now and Next (examining the impact of the 2010 earthquake on Haiti's social and political future). His conversations with Paul Price have received wide circulation, podcast as Societas.
Calhoun has written more than 100 scholarly articles and chapters as well as books, among which his most famous is a study of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994). Calhoun's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Thesis Eleven (2006, Vol. 84, No. 1) devoted a special issue to his work, "Craig Calhoun: Critical Social Sciences and the Public Sphere." He was also editor in chief of the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences.
Calhoun has been honored as both an undergraduate and graduate teacher. At NYU he teaches an undergraduate class on social thought in the ancient and modern worlds and graduate classes on historical sociology and social, cultural, and political theory.
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| Preceded by Judith Rees |
Director of the London School of Economics 2012 – |
Succeeded by |