Daniel Carpenter

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Daniel Carpenter is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. His research combines primary-source historical inquiry, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis to analyze American political development and bureaucratic politics. He is the author of The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton University Press, 2001), which won the American Political Science Association's Gladys Kammerer Award and other prizes. He is currently completing his book “Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA.”

At Radcliffe, Carpenter will work on “The American Antislavery Petition in Political and Historical Context,” a multiyear study of petitioning activity in the United States that begins with antislavery petitioning in the antebellum period. Having collected a database covering more than four thousand antislavery petitions, he will address several abiding questions of American politics, including how petitioning introduced citizens to political activity; connected individuals, families, and communities to organizations; transformed communities; and coexisted with the vibrant mass parties of the 1800s.

Carpenter has been a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the University of Michigan and held a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007–2008. He received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Harvard Professor Games the Game on the Fall Presidential Election (Harvard Gazette, 8/18/20)