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This featured post includes excerpts from Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Hahrie Han’s website.
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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 specializes in the study of organizing, movements, collective action, civic engagement, and democracy. Han is the first Johns Hopkins faculty member to receive a MacArthur Fellowship since 2008.
“If democracy is about how we forge a common life together, then my work focuses on how we equip people with the skills and motivations they need to work with others from all different backgrounds to do the hard work of democracy.” – Hahrie Han, John Hopkins UniversityThe award, often called a “genius grant,” is given annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals,” a mix of visual artists and writers, scientists and scholars. Honorees are nominated by anonymous experts in their fields and receive $800,000 over five years to advance their work in any way they choose, “no strings attached.”
She has written for scholarly and public outlets ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation, and delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University in 2024. Dr. Han served on the APSA Task Force for New Partnerships (2018-2019), organized by former APSA president Rogers Smith, and chaired by Robert Lieberman of JHU. She has also served on APSA Civic Engagement Committee (2009-2012), and on the leadership of the APSA Public Policy Organized Section among other sections and caucuses.
About Hahrie’s Work
Hahrie Han is a political scientist addressing critical questions about how and why people participate in civic and political life. Employing a range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental, and quantitative methods, she examines organizational structures and tactics that encourage individuals to interact across lines of difference and work together for change in the public sphere.
She has published five books. 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. Her latest book (Knopf 2024), about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, was named to the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2024, and the New Yorker’s list of Recommended Books for 2024.
Dr. Han has made invaluable and innovative contributions to our understanding of political and civic participation, organizational dynamics, and democracy. Her multidisciplinary P3 Lab, which brings together students, postdocs, faculty and practitioners, is groundbreaking and highlights the intersection of community organizing, collective active and scholarly research.”
– Kimberly A. Mealy, APSA Executive Director
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, and 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.
We are thrilled that the MacArthur Foundation has chosen to recognize Hahrie Han as worthy of their ‘genius’ grant,” JHU President Ron Daniels said. “She is, of course, the visionary inaugural director who brought our SNF Agora Institute to life. But this honor celebrates Hahrie Han, the researcher whose scholarship is transforming her field and deepening our understanding of how to build stronger democracies at this historic moment. We are so proud to call Hahrie one of our own at Hopkins, and even more so to know she will extend the reach of her insights in the years ahead thanks to the support of the MacArthur Fellowship. Congratulations to Hahrie and to the entire extraordinary class of 2025 MacArthur Fellows.”
