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Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of Political Science; Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

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 cultural 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. For 2012-2015, Igo has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which she will use to pursue training in sociolegal thought and jurisprudence at U.C. Berkeley's Law School and Center for the Study of Law and Society. Igo has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, and a Havens Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 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 and the 2015 best paper award for “overall excellence and relevance to the practice of privacy law” of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. Professor Igo 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. She is also the co-director of a three-year project funded by the Teagle Foundation, the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education.

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.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of Political Science; Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University