Associate Professor of International Studies and Public Affairs
Associate Director, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Ph.D., 1994, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill
Specialization areas: Social demography, environment, development and globalization, gender.

Sara Curran joined the faculty of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs in 2005. Prior to that she was an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Princeton University, where she was also a faculty associate in the Office of Population Research, and in the Center for International Studies. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan (B.S., natural resource management), North Carolina State University (M.S., sociology and economics), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D., sociology).

Curran researches internal migration in developing countries, globalization, family demography, environment and population, and gender. She is writing a book, Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, Gender and Family Dynamics in Thailand, which analyzes how migration and education transformed Thai society between 1984-2000.  She received the outstanding faculty advising award from the Princeton Sociology majors in 2002 and 2004.  She has authored work that has appeared in Demography, Population and Development Review, Social Science Research, Teaching Sociology, Journal of International Women's Studies, and Journal of Marriage and the Family. She serves on several national and international advisory committees and boards. 

Curran and the Global Washington Initiative in the news http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/321554_globalwa28.html Curran recently completed directing the research for the Global Washington Initiative, a statewide collaborative effort to identify and promote the innovations and efforts around the state that benefit global sustainable development. For more information, please visit the Global Washington Initiative homepage http://www.globalwa.org New Grant Curran and Massey received funding from NSF for a project entitled Collaborative Research: Migration & Social Dynamics – Unpacking The Black Box of Cumulative Causation. New Report Curran directed a Jackson School Task Force in the spring of 2006 ~ Trafficking in Persons – Spotlight on Washington. The report was presented publicly and some of the work was adopted by the International Rescue Committee. Ongoing Projects Sara Curran and her colleagues from Brandeis University and Wellesley College have just been awarded a prestigious grant in the field of religious studies from the Templeton Foundation for a project entitled: Comparing Spiritual and Other Forms of Social Capital: Lessons from the Immigrant Experience Curran and Sanjeev Khagram (Evans School) received funding from The Gates Foundation for a project entitled: Mapping and Empowering Public Health Networks in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia Curran and colleagues at Princeton University (Miguel Centeno), Netmap Analytics (John Galloway), and UCLA (Abigail Cooke) are building the research infrastructure to study global transactions. Visit their website: www.princeton.edu/~mapglobe/HTML/home.html Just Published Sara Curran and co-editor, Ellen Perecman, have a new research methods book published through Sage: A Handbook For Social Science Field Research: Essays and Bibliographic Sources on Research Design and Methods. http://www.sagepub.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book227693