The Social Science Research Council is an independent non-profit organization devoted to the advancement of social science research and scholarship. Founded in New York City in 1923 as the world’s first national coordinating body of the social sciences, it is today an international resource for interdisciplinary, innovative public social science.
The Council has a mission to lead innovation in the social sciences, build interdisciplinary and international networks, mobilize knowledge on important public issues, and educate and train the next generation of social science researchers. Read our full mission statement.
The SSRC pursues its mission by awarding fellowships and grants, convening workshops and conferences, participating in research consortia, sponsoring scholarly exchanges, organizing summer training institutes, and producing print and online publications.
Under the leadership of Craig Calhoun (1999-present), the SSRC has focused on global security and cooperation, knowledge institutions, migration, and renewing the public as its four thematic areas, with close to twenty major programs within these areas. Topics include American human development, digital media and learning, international migration, media reform, the privatization of risk, religion and international affairs, and the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS in Russia, Africa and around the world. We also offer several prestigious fellowships for researchers doing promising work in the social sciences and related disciplines. Our largest fellowship program, the International Dissertation Research Fellowships (IDRF), funds graduate students for research in all parts of the globe.
The SSRC is guided by the belief that justice, prosperity, and democracy all require better understanding of complex social, cultural, economic, and political processes. We are committed to the idea that social science can produce necessary knowledge—necessary for citizens to understand their societies and necessary for policy makers to decide on crucial questions.
The Council has provided over 10,000 fellowships to graduate students and young researchers around the world since our inception in 1923. Our networks and committees have pioneered new approaches to understanding society and processes of social, cultural, economic, and political change, and have profoundly influenced many fields of social inquiry, from pioneering work on business cycles in the 1920s to the emergence of security studies in the 1980s and 1990s.
