Description: Biography.
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Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and the Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the College of Arts and Science. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Professor Igo’s primary research interests are in modern American cultural, intellectual, legal and political history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere.
Igo’s most recent book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces U.S. debates that reshaped the meanings of privacy, beginning with “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century and culminating in our present dilemmas over social media and big data. Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society, the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians,
Igo's 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. An Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007, The Averaged American was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Cheiron Book Prize as well as a