Sarah Babb

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

Sarah Babb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has conducted research on social movements, economic policy, and Latin America. Her forthcoming book, to be published by Princeton University Press, examines the history of the economics profession in Mexico—where it was originally a nationalist and left-leaning discipline that was transformed into a seedbed of US-trained technocrats promoting free-market reforms.

During her Radcliffe fellowship year, Babb will expand her geopolitical scope and conduct a cross-national study of the antecedents and elements of free-market reforms in a more diverse array of nations. She will use comparative and historical sociological methods for this research. Babb’s goal is to clarify how globally integrated financial markets create incentives for national governments to pursue neoliberal reforms.

Babb earned her PhD in sociology at Northwestern University. She has received a research grant from the Social Science Research Council, an Institute of International Education Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship for Doctoral Studies, and the 1999 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association.