Amy Binder is an SNF Agora Institute Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She studies education from a political, organizational, and cultural perspective.
She is co-author, with Jeffrey Kidder, of The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (University of Chicago Press, 2022); co-author, with Kate Wood, of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University Press, 2013); and author of Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2002). Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Social Problems, Sociology of Education, Sociological Forum, Theory and Society, and several other academic journals. Her public-facing work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington Post, and the Washington Monthly. Her research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the National Academy of Education, and she has been a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.
Professor Binder is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association and has served as chair of the Sociology of Education section of the American Sociological Association. She was elected as council member for four ASA sections: Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Education, Political Sociology, and Organizations Occupations and Work. She served as department chair at UC San Diego from 2019 to 2022 and is an emerita member of the Academic Advisory Board of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
She holds a BA in Anthropology from Stanford University and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University.
She can be reached at [email protected].