Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. An economic sociologist, Bandelj studies how culture, social relations, emotions and power influence economic and organizational processes, including money, inequality, large-scale economic transformations, and ideas about economy. Her articles have been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Socio-Economic Review, among others. Her books include From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Direct Investment in Postsocialist Europe (Princeton University Press, 2008), Economy and State: A Sociological Perspective (Polity Press, 2010, with Elizabeth Sowers), Economic Sociology of Work (Emerald Publishing, 2009), The Cultural Wealth of Nations (Stanford University Press, 2011, with Frederick F. Wherry), Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged: Eastern Europe and China, 1989-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2012, with Dorothy Solinger), Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana Zelizer) and Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton University Press, 2026). Bandelj is past Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the European University Institute in Florence. She is an elected member of the honorary Sociological Research Association, a recipient of the Distinguished Mid-Career Award for Service and the Dynamic Women Award for Academic Achievement from UC Irvine and holds a lifetime appointment as Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Bandelj served as inaugural associate vice provost for faculty development at UC Irvine, as editor of Socio-Economic Review, Vice-President of the American Sociological Association and President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University.
