Sarah E. Igo
Associate Professor of History
Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History who received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2001). Her primary research interests are in modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere. Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation, and was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association. She is currently at work on a cultural history of modern privacy, examined through legal debates, artistic and architectural movements, technological innovations, professional codes, and re-imaginings of domestic life.
Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the recent recipient of the Early Career Award from the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences and the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences. In 2006-2007 she was a visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and in 2008 she will be a Havens Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Igo has taught in the Department of History at Penn since 2001. She is a member of the Graduate Group in the History and Sociology of Science and an interdisciplinary faculty group at Harvard University devoted to rethinking American education. She is also a resident Faculty Fellow at Ware College House. Professor Igo received the Department of History's Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003. She teaches survey courses in twentieth-century U.S. history and American intellectual history as well as a range of undergraduate and graduate seminars on topics in cultural history ranging from "Self and Society" to "The Politics of Knowledge."
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 164 Recent American History
- HIST 379 Modern American Intellectual and Cultural History
- HIST 610 History of Modern Social Knowledge
- HIST 610 Topics in American Cultural History
- HIST 710 Research Seminar in American History
