Craig Calhoun
Craig Calhoun is the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously, Calhoun was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and President of the Berggruen Institute. He was also a professor at NYU (where he founded the Institute for Public Knowledge), Columbia University, and UNC-Chapel Hill (where he founded the University Center for International Studies and served as Dean of the Graduate School).
A comparative and historical sociologist and social theorist, Calhoun is also engaged in anthropology, communications, economics, history, international studies, political science, philosophy, and science and technology studies. His newest book is Degenerations of Democracy, with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar (Harvard University Press 2022). He is also the editor, with Benjamin Fong, of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia University Press, 2022) and, with a group of his former students, of the most widely used anthologies of Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Blackwell, 4th ed, 2022). He the author of nine earlier books including Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; and Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference; Roots of Radicalism.
Calhoun’s current research focuses on contemporary transformations, and possible futures: for the political economy of the modern world-system, for universities and knowledge institutions, for democracy, and for shifting structures of social solidarity from local communities to nations, transnational relations, and the reorganization of regions. More philosophically, he is exploring the relationship between transformation and transcendence in understanding human existence itself.
Among other positions in leadership and public engagement, he is a member of the Board of the MasterCard Foundation, Chair of the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and Chair of the Board of the American Assembly at Columbia.