Short Bio: Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of four books and numerous articles published in leading scholarly outlets including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. She has also written for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum's Schwab Foundation. Her fifth book, about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, will be published with Knopf in September 2024.

Long Bio: Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum's Schwab Foundation. From 2015-2019, she was the Anton Vonk Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2005-2015, she was on faculty of the Department of Political Science at Wellesley College and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University from 2009-2011. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, collective action, civic engagement, and democracy.

She has published four books. Her most recent book (co-authored with Liz McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa) was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. This book examines the way some grassroots organizations translate the engagement of their people into political power, acting like prisms refracting white light into vectors of power and light and was awarded the Michael Harrington Book Award by the American Political Science Association in 2022. Her fifth book, about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, will be published with Knopf in September 2024.

Her previous book, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2014) examines the strategies that the most effective civic associations use to engage activists and develop leaders in health and environmental politics. Another book, Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (co-authored with Liz McKenna, Oxford University Press, 2014) describes the strategies the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaign used to engage so many grassroots activists in communities across America. Her first book, Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2009) examined the ways in which people become motivated to participate in politics, looking particularly at means of engaging underprivileged populations in political action. Hahrie’s other work on participation, movement-building, civic associations, primary elections, and congressional polarization has been published in outlets including American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. Her work was a finalist for the 2022 frank Prize for Excellence in Public Interest Communication and was awarded the 2013 Outstanding Academic Publication on Membership Organizations Award by the Institute for Nonprofit Research, Education, and Engagement.

Hahrie has also been involved in numerous efforts to make academic work relevant to the world of practice, including (most recently): serving as the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute; co-founding the Center for Democracy and Organizing; participating in the Social Science Research Council Anxieties of Democracy Participation Working Group; and co-founding and co-directing the Project on Public Leadership and Action at Wellesley College. She currently serves on the board of the JPB Foundation, the Water Foundation, and serves on advisory boards for Citizens Climate Lobby, the Walton Family Foundation Home Region Research Advisory Council, and others. She has also served on the editorial boards of American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and the Milbank Quarterly. Through her research, she has partnered with a wide range of civic and political organizations and movements around the world, including those in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In all of this work, she seeks to develop the leadership of younger scholars and practitioners, especially women and people of color.

She also acted as co-convenor of a Policy Advisory Committee for the 2008 Obama campaign and served as Chair of the Advisory Committee to the EAC Agency Review Team on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and also as National Issues and Policy Advisor to Senator Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign in 1999-2000.  She received her Ph.D. in American Politics from Stanford University in 2005 and her B.A. in American History and Literature from Harvard University in 1997. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow from 2002-2005 and received Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Award in 2002 and Wellesley College’s Apgar Award for Innovative Teaching in 2006. She is the daughter of Korean immigrants, grew up in Houston, Texas, and currently lives in Baltimore, MD. 

Here is Hahrie's full CV (updated January 2020).