Sydney Van Morgan, Sr. Lecturer and International Studies Program Director, holds a PhD in government from Cornell University and has taught courses on comparative political sociology, party politics, qualitative methods and the life of Johns Hopkins. As International Studies Program Director, she is responsible for the academic coordination of six stakeholder departments in the humanities and social sciences, establishing the curriculum for the major in collaboration with these departments and their faculty. She also administers the BA/MA Program with the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies in DC, the Junior Year/Semester Abroad Program at SAIS Europe in Bologna, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program, and an eclectic range of activities associated with the Aronson Center for International Studies. Dr. Van Morgan is actively involved in several professional organizations in the field of international education, where she has presented papers on topics such as evaluation practices and enrollment trends in international studies. Her most recent scholarly project explores the life history and Quaker roots of Johns Hopkins, the founder of Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. Her co-authored preprint article "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery" is available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/zra5f/. A companion blog, The House of Hopkins, can be viewed at https://www.thehouseofhopkins.com/. Her work has been published in Regional and Federal Studies and, most recently, in the Journal for Slavery Data and Preservation.

Dr. Van Morgan's recent work explores the life of Johns Hopkins, the history of his Quaker family in Maryland, and the politics of the abolitionist movement.

From 2022 to 2024, she mentored a team of four JHU undergraduate students that produced peer-reviewed research on the history of slave manumission in Maryland. See Van Morgan, Sydney, Bailey Pasternak, Lydia Wan, Qingxi Wang, and Hardy Williams. "Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 5, no. 4 (2024): 30-37. https://doi.org/10.25971/7f3g-yx02. 

Her co-authored preprint article "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery," published in 2021, is available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/zra5f/.

Along with her research colleagues, Van Morgan presented a paper entitled "Johns Hopkins, the Census of 1850, and Slavery" at the Universities Studying Slavery 2022 spring symposium at Guilford College (March 31, 2022). The latest version of the paper is available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/gu2wr/. 

For more information about this and related projects, see https://www.thehouseofhopkins.com/ and the Johns Hopkins History Project page at https://osf.io/b6ys3/. 

Fall 2024 - AS.001.242 First Year Seminar "Johns Hopkins: Toward a New Biography of the Founder"

2024

Van Morgan, Sydney, Bailey Pasternak, Lydia Wan, Qingxi Wang, and Hardy Williams. "Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 5, no. 4 (2024): 30-37. https://doi.org/10.25971/7f3g-yx02. 

2023
Van Morgan, Sydney, Edward C. Papenfuse, Stan Becker, and Samuel B. Hopkins. 2023. “A Maryland Mystery: Johns Hopkins, Slavery, and the Census of 1850.” OSF Preprints. October 13. doi:10.31219/osf.io/gu2wr. See https://osf.io/gu2wr/. 

2022
Kuo, Huei-ying and Sydney Van Morgan, “Introduction: The Question of Chineseness in Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporas,” special volume of Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives. See https://www.growkudos.com/profile/sydney_morgan. 

2021
Van Morgan, Sydney, Stan Becker, Samuel B. Hopkins, and Edward C. Papenfuse, “Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery,” OSF Preprints. May 18. doi:10.31219/osf.io/zra5f. See https://osf.io/zra5f/.