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The Council Mourns the Passing of Former SSRC President Eleanor Bernert Sheldon

Eleanor Bernert Sheldon, sociologist and leading figure in the establishment of the field of social indicators, who served as the first woman president of the Social Science Research Council (1972–1979), passed away on May 8 at the age of 101. Sheldon first joined the Council as a staff member from 1950 to 1951, after earning her PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. She went on to work as a researcher at Columbia University, the United Nations, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and served as executive associate of the Russell Sage Foundation from 1961 until 1972. She …

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Gabriela Kirk of Northwestern University Awarded First Annual Charles E. Lindblom Memorial Fellowship

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is pleased to announce that Gabriela Kirk of Northwestern University has been awarded the first annual Charles E. Lindblom Memorial Fellowship for her project entitled, “Can Electronic Monitoring Fix Mass Incarceration? Understanding the Role of Electronic Monitoring in Local Policy Reform.” The Charles E. Lindblom Memorial Fellowship is exclusively open to doctoral candidates at the partner institutions of the SSRC College and University Fund for the Social Sciences. Awarded annually, it supports an interdisciplinary social science project that focuses on anticipatory social research, an approach that directs research toward identifying, contextualizing, and framing emergent social phenomena.

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Dr. Anna Harvey has been selected as the Council’s 15th president and CEO

The Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has named Anna Harvey, a leading scholar of government, law, and inequality, and professor of politics at New York University (NYU), as its 15th president and CEO. Professor Harvey succeeds President Alondra Nelson and will take the helm of the 98-year-old organization beginning July 1, 2021. “We are delighted that Anna Harvey will lead the SSRC into its second century,” said Helen Milner, chair of the SSRC Executive Committee and search committee chair. “She has a deep understanding of interdisciplinary developments in social science, as well as the need

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Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has been chosen as the next SSRC Fellow

The Social Science Research Council is proud to announce that Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta will be its next SSRC Fellow. Dr. Mehta will be in residency at the Council in November, during which he will lead seminars and deliver the 2021 SSRC Fellow Lecture. The SSRC Fellow initiative invites distinguished scholars to the Council to strengthen research and programming in the areas in which we currently work or aspire to work. Most recently, the SSRC hosted Dr. Aihwa Ong as its 2020 fellow. Established in 2019 with inaugural fellow Lorraine Daston, the SSRC Fellow program broadens the thematic purview of the former

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Announcing the 2020 Grantees: New Interdisciplinary Projects in the Social Sciences

The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce the 2020 grantees of New Interdisciplinary Projects in the Social Sciences, a request for proposals open exclusively to faculty of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences member institutions. Scholarly Borderlands, the Council’s research incubator program, invited proposals for interdisciplinary working groups that would ask novel questions, develop new frameworks, rethink methodological approaches, and find innovative answers. Applicants were encouraged, although not required, to submit applications for research projects related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The response to this competition made it clear that this kind of funding fills a significant gap in

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Seventy Scholars Awarded International Dissertation Research Fellowships

The latest cohort of International Dissertation Research Fellows, a distinguished group of 70 junior scholars, will conduct 9–12 months of doctoral research across the globe. Launched in 1997, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) has been a core component of the Social Science Research Council for more than 20 years, and traces its roots at the organization to the 1950s. To date, the IDRF program has funded more than 1,400 scholars to conduct research across the world. These scholars embody the spirit of intellectual discovery that has been synonymous with the program since its inception. The 2019 cohort is indicative of the wide

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Nelson Announces Plans to Step Down as SSRC President in Early Fall 2021

Board Kicks Off Search for Next Leader New York -The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) today announced that President Alondra Nelson, the acclaimed scholar and former Columbia University Dean, who has led the SSRC since 2017, will be stepping down in the early fall of 2021, and that a search for her successor is now underway. In a letter to SSRC staff and partners, Board chair Dr. Mamadou Diouf said of Dr. Nelson, “Her commitment to scholarly rigor, insistence on research innovation and experimentation, and pursuit of new and novel partnerships has reinvigorated the SSRC and positioned it for a vibrant

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A Statement from the Social Science Research Council

Academic integrity and scholarly independence are bedrock values of the Social Science Research Council. Rigorous and independent peer review has been critical to our fellowship selection process, and always will be. A September 2019 article in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom brought to light deviations from those norms with respect to the 2015 Abe Fellowship selection process, and in particular the scoring and selection as it related to scholar Celeste Arrington. Our own investigation found the part of the article describing practices in the 2015 Abe selection process that deviated from the established procedures and protocols in place at the SSRC

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