| Sarah E. Igo | |
| Education: | B.A., Social Studies, Harvard University M.A., PhD, History, 2001, Princeton University |
| Thesis Title: | America surveyed: the making of a social scientific public, 1920-1960 |
| Thesis Year: | 2001 |
| Spouse: | Ole Molvig |
| Workplaces: | University of Pennsylvania Vanderbilt University |
| Awards: | Merle Curti Award Ralph Waldo Emerson Award |
Sarah Elizabeth Igo (born 1969) is an American historian and author. She is the Andrew Jackson Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University.
Igo was born in 1969.[1] She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in social studies from Harvard University and her PhD in history from Princeton University.[2] During her post-secondary school education at Harvard and Princeton, Igo was the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and Whiting Foundation in the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship.[3]
Upon earning her PhD, Igo joined the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant professor of History.[4] During her tenure at the university, she received the 2004 American Council of Learned Societies Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship to research her first book.[5] Igo eventually published her first book in 2007 titled The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. She republished her dissertation into a social sciences book focused on how the increasing use of surveys, polls and other forms of statistical measurements have shaped American society.[6] [7] For her efforts, she received the 2007 President's Book Award, which "rewards an especially meritorious first work by a beginning scholar and is judged on the criteria of scholarly significance, interdisciplinary reach and past structures and events and change over time."[8] She also won the Cheiron Book Prize and was named a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Sociological Association.[2] Prior to leaving the University of Pennsylvania, she co-founded the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education with Peter Struck.[9]
In 2008, Igo left the University of Pennsylvania to become an Associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where her husband also worked.[10] Upon joining Vanderbilt, Igo began working on her second book The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. In order to write her book, she received a Short Term Visiting Scholarship from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science[11] and the New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.[12] After years of research, Igo published The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America in 2018, which focused on why and how privacy became a concern to American citizens.[13] [14] It went on to win the 2019 American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History,[15] the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award,[16] the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award[17] and the Chancellor's Award for Research.[18] In the same year, Igo was appointed to the residential faculty of E. Bronson Ingram College to "help expand the student learning experience beyond the classroom"[19] and the Committee on Enhancing Faculty Voices in the Public Sphere.[20]
On September 20, 2019, Igo was promoted to the Andrew Jackson Endowed Chair in American History.[21]
Igo and her husband, historian Ole Molvig, have three daughters together.[22]