Sydney Van Morgan
International Studies Program Director; Sr. Lecturer
Contact Information
- sydney@jhu.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
- Mergenthaler 264
- By appointment
- 607-227-3644 (mobile)
- Personal Website
- Follow Me on Social Media
Research Interests: Political Sociology, Social Movements, Party Politics, American Political History
Education: PhD, Cornell University
Sydney Van Morgan is a Senior Lecturer and International Studies Program Director. She earned her 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 Director of International Studies, Dr. Van Morgan oversees the academic coordination of six stakeholder departments across the humanities and social sciences, shaping the program’s curriculum in collaboration with faculty. She also manages key initiatives, including the BA/MA Program with the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, the Junior Year/Semester Abroad Program at SAIS Europe in Bologna, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program, and a broad range of activities organized under the ambit of the Aronson Center for International Studies.
A committed scholar in international education, Dr. Van Morgan is an active member of several professional organizations, where she has presented on topics such as evaluation practices and enrollment trends in international studies. Her latest research focuses on the life and Quaker heritage of Johns Hopkins, the founder of Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. She co-authored the preprint article "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery," available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), and maintains a companion blog, The House of Hopkins (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 research delves into the life of Johns Hopkins, the history of his Quaker family, slavery in the Upper South, and the political dynamics of the abolitionist movement. Currently, she is working on a biography of Hopkins.
From 2022 to 2024, she mentored a team of four JHU undergraduate researchers, guiding them in the production of peer-reviewed scholarship on the history of slave manumission in Maryland. Their work, "Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785," was published in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (Vol. 5, No. 4, 2024): 30–37. Read the article.
Her co-authored preprint article, "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery," which was featured in the Washington Post, was published in 2021 and is available on Open Science Framework.
In collaboration with her research colleagues, Van Morgan presented "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 under review for publication and accessible on Open Science Framework.
For more on these and related projects, visit The House of Hopkins and the Johns Hopkins History Project.
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/.