Biography
Son of a somewhat itinerant preacher, Craig Calhoun lived in the rural areas, small towns, big cities and suburbs of several states while growing up, but spent more of his life in North Carolina than anywhere else. He received his doctorate from Oxford University for work combining politics, sociology, and history, later published as The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution. He has published widely since, especially on the social theory and comparative history of work; democracy; social movements; community, nationalism and other forms of solidarity; and transformations of political economy. His newest books are Degenerations of Democracy (with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor) and The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (edited with Ben Fong).
Craig continues to work on the social foundations and challenges of democracy, on the tensions between cosmopolitanism and belonging, on upheavals in global political economy, on the implications of technological change including shifting infrastructures and transformations of the human, and on identifying and trying wisely to choose and fight for possible futures.
Committed to knowledge and institutions as well as progressive social change, Craig founded the Institute for Public Knowledge while a professor at NYU and was President of the Social Science Research Council and Director of the London School of Economics. Since 2018, he has been University Professor of Social Sciences at ASU. He helped to bring the Center for Work and Democracy to ASU and chairs its advisory board.