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Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professorship of Sociology

Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Established in 2020 by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation

The STAVROS NIARCHOS FOUNDATION (SNF) is one of the world’s leading private, international philanthropic organizations, making grants to nonprofit organizations in the areas of arts and culture, education, health, and sports and social welfare. SNF funds organizations and projects worldwide that aim to achieve a broad, lasting, and positive impact for society at large and exhibit strong leadership and sound management. The Foundation also supports projects that facilitate the formation of public-private partnerships as an effective means for serving public welfare.

Held by Amy Binder

AMY BINDER, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and comes to Johns Hopkins from the University of California San Diego. She studies education from a political, organizational, and cultural perspective.

In 2002, she wrote Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools; this book, published by Princeton University Press, won three awards, including the outstanding book award from the Culture section of the American Sociological Association and the American Educational Research Association’s major book award. In 2013, she co-authored Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University Press), which has been covered widely in the media. Her most recent book, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Todaywas published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. She has written several articles, co-edited a special issue on cultural sociology in the American Annals of Political and Social Sciences, and has written opinion editorials and articles, including in the Washington Post and the Washington Monthly.

Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation and Kauffman Foundation and, earlier in her career, was a postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education. She was elected chair of the Sociology of Education section of the American Sociological Association, served as a deputy editor for the journal Sociology of Education, and has been a member of three section councils for the ASA: Sociology of Culture, Political Sociology, and Organization Occupations and Work. In 2020, she was elected to the Sociological Research Association. She served as department chair at UC San Diego from 2019 to 2022 and is an emerita member of the Academic Advisory Board of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.