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 Theda Skocpol
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology
Biographical Note:
THEDA SKOCPOL is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, where she served as Director of the Center for American Political Studies (1999 to 2006) and as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005 to 2007).
Skocpol received her B.A. in 1969 from Michigan State University and her PhD in 1975 from Harvard University. In 1996, Skocpol served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group; and from 2001 to 2003 she served as President-Elect and then President of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, she is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Skocpol has been awarded honorary degrees by Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Amherst College.
The author of nine books, ten edited collections, and more than a hundred articles, Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences; her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the past fifteen years, Skocpol’s research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards: the J. David Greenstone Award of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association; the Outstanding Book Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, given annually for “the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs;” the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, given to honor “a comprehensive study that contributes significantly to historical, philosophical, or religious interpretations of the human condition.”
Skocpol’s recent books include Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (1996); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003, winner of the 2004 Greenstone Award); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2005); What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz, 2006, winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award); and The Transformation of American Politics (co-edited with Paul Pierson, 2007).
Skocpol’s current research focuses on civic engagement, governmental transformation, and reform politics in the United States and on the development of U.S. social and educational policies in historical and comparative perspective. Skocpol writes both for scholarly outlets and publications appealing to the educated public. Married since 1967 to Bill Skocpol, an experimental physicist who teaches at Boston University, Theda Skocpol is the proud mother of Michael Allan Skocpol, born in 1988.
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