Craig Calhoun has been President of the Social Science Research Council since 1999. He is also University Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. Mr. Calhoun received his doctorate from Oxford University and has also been a professor and dean at the University of North Carolina and a visiting professor in Asmara, Beijing, Khartoum, Oslo, Paris, and Berlin.

Under Mr. Calhoun’s leadership, the SSRC has initiated major projects on public social science, global security and cooperation, gender and conflict, digital media and learning, the privatization of risk, religion and the public sphere, intellectual property rights, humanitarian emergences, HIV/AIDS, the social sciences in Africa, transregional integration in Asia, and a range of other issues. It has also substantially increased the number of fellowships it offers annually.

As an individual scholar Mr. Calhoun has done research on a variety of themes in historical sociology, political economy, social movements, social theory, and the history of social sciences. His new book, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early 19^th Century Social Movements is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Among his best known earlier books are Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge 2007), Nationalism (Minnesota 1997), Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Problem of Specificity (Blackwell, 1995), and Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California 1994).

Mr. Calhoun recently edited a three-volume collection, Possible Futures (NYU 2011), which explores the impact of financial crisis, the challenges of global governance addressing issues from war to climate change, and the future of development. Calhoun has edited several earlier books for the SSRC including The Public Mission of the Research University (with Diana Rhoten, Columbia 2010), Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science (Columbia 2010), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (with J. VanAntwerpen and M. Warner, Harvard 2009), Sociology in America (Chicago 2007), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (with F. Cooper and K. Moore, New Press 2006), and Understanding 9/11 (with P. Price and A. Timmer, New Press 2002).