Faculty

Sarah Igo
Associate Professor of History
Associate Professor of Political Science
Associate Professor of Sociology

PhD, Princeton, 2001

Modern U.S. cultural, intellectual, and political history; history of the human sciences; sociology of knowledge; history of the public sphere.

Telephone: on leave
Email: sarah.igo@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2009-2010
Office: 201 Benson Hall

 

Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History who received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.  Her primary research interests are in modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere.  Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation.  An Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007, The Averaged American was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Cheiron Book Prize as well as a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award of the American Sociological Association.  Professor Igo is currently at work on a history of modern privacy, examined through legal debates, artistic and architectural movements, technological innovations, professional codes, and shifting social norms.

Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.  She is the recipient of the Early Career Award from the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences and the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences.  In 2006-2007 she was a visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and in 2008 was a Havens Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She has been a member of two ongoing collaborations, the Social Science Research Council Working Group on the Transformation of Public Research Universities and the National Young Faculty Leaders Forum at Harvard University’s Center for Business and Government. Sarah Igo has been awarded a Teagle Foundation Grant of $392,000 to co-direct a three year project, the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education (2009-2012).

Professor Igo teaches a wide range of courses in twentieth-century U.S. cultural and intellectual history at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  She joins the Vanderbilt history department after seven years at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Associate Professor of History and the recipient of the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching. 

Courses teaching 2008-2009:
HIST 142 U.S. Post-1945: Cold War to the Present
HIST 200 The History Workshop
HIST 302b Readings in American History: Civil War to present