Young Scholar Receives Book Award
September 2006
The Social Science History Association has awarded its President's Book Award to Assistant Professor Sarah Igo for her book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public. The President's Book Award "rewards an especially meritorious first work by a beginning scholar and is judged on the criteria of scholarly significance, interdisciplinary reach and past structures and events and change over time."
Igo's scholarship encompasses modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge and the history of the public sphere. Her new book explores the relationship between survey data - opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research - and modern understandings of self and nation. In The Averaged American, she argues that modern survey techniques and findings project new visions of the nation - authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal - that have become part of our vocabulary about and understanding of who we, as modern Americans, think we are.