Andrew J. Perrin SNF Agora Professor of Sociology

I am a cultural and political sociologist. Broadly speaking, I study and teach democratic citizenship in the United States. I focus on the cultural and social underpinnings of democracy: what do people need to know, be, and do to make democracy work? My current research is on public opinion, letters to the editor, and democratic citizenship. I am the SNF Agora Professor in the sociology department at Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

I was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 2001-2021. Most recently, I was the Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities there.

I am a regular contributor to Scatterplot, the sociology blog, and I read a variety of other social scientific, academic, and political blogs.

In 1991-92, I worked for The Namibian , an independent newspaper in Windhoek, Namibia.

I graduated from Swarthmore College in 1994 and spent the following summer working for the Grassroots Policy Project on labor-environment coalition building in the Great Lakes. I am now a Senior Research Fellow at GPP. I then moved to Rochester, New York, where I worked for Tex-Port, Inc., doing computer repairs and support. My biggest customer was Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which in turn was under contract to support three General Motors units in the Rochester area.

I got my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. In addition, I used to do various computer work for the Demography department and consulting work for DHL World Airways.