Katherine S. Newman
James B. Knapp Dean of
The Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
237 Mergenthaler
The Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, Md. 21218
Phone: (410) 516-4065
Fax: (410) 516-4100
Email: knewman@jhu.edu
Sociologist Katherine S. Newman is a widely published expert on poverty and the working poor who led major interdisciplinary initiatives at Princeton and Harvard universities before being named James B. Knapp Dean of the Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
A distinguished scholar, veteran academic leader, and talented and dedicated educator, Newman assumed the deanship on Sept. 1 and holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Sociology.
Newman was previously the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes '41 Professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, where she had taught since 2004. From 2007 to 2010, she directed Princeton's university-wide Institute for International and Regional Studies. She founded and chaired Princeton’s joint doctoral program in social policy, sociology, politics, and psychology.
Previously, during eight years at Harvard University, she was the first dean of social science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. While there, she designed a university-wide research program in the social sciences, promoting collaboration among faculty from the arts and sciences, public health, medicine, law and education. She also has served on the faculties of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Newman, who has written 11 books and five edited volumes thus far, has focused much of her scholarly work on the lives of the working poor and mobility up and down the economic ladder. She also has investigated the impact of tax policy on the poor, the history of public opinion's impact on poverty policy, school violence, and the impact of globalization on young people in Italy, Spain, Japan, and South Africa, among other issues.
Her most recent book (in collaboration with Rourke O’Brien) is Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged (University of California Press, 2011), an analysis of the impact of regressive taxation on poverty-related outcomes. Her forthcoming volume, The Accordion Family (Beacon Press, 2012) examines global competition in youth labor markets and the prolonged stay in the natal home that is unfolding as a result in Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. Newman’s current research focuses on the first generation to come of age in democratic South Africa (in collaboration with Ariane Delannoy) and on the labor market trajectories of graduates from low performing high schools in New York City and Tokyo (in collaboration with Mary Brinton).
Newman graduated in 1975 from the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in sociology and philosophy. She earned a PhD in anthropology in 1979 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Learn more about Katherine Newman and her appointment as dean: http://krieger.jhu.edu/deanappointment.
Also: The Futures Seminars are conversations exploring the future of the academic disciplines in Arts & Sciences. Learn all about this year's scheduled seminars.
