Professor Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He holds joint appointments in the School of Politics and Global Studies, the School of Public Affairs, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the School of Sustainability, and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. Prior to coming to Arizona State University, Calhoun served as director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He was previously president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), dean of the Graduate School and director of the University Center for International Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and founder and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University (NYU). In addition to UNC and NYU, he has been a professor at Columbia University and the University of Oslo and a visiting professor at several international universities.
Throughout his career Professor Calhoun has been involved in projects bringing social science to bear on issues of public concern. These have ranged from consulting on rural education and development in North Carolina, to advising the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea, to helping develop communications infrastructure in Sudan. He co-founded, with Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE, the NYLON programme which brings together graduate students from New York and London for co-operative research programmes.
He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Describing his own approach to academic work, Professor Calhoun says: “We must set high standards for ourselves, but in order to inform the public well, not to isolate ourselves from it.”