Brian Burgoon appointed AISSR director
On 1 June 2014, Prof. Brian Burgoon will be appointed director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR).
Burgoon will succeed Prof. Anita Hardon, who was appointed to lay the groundwork for the yet to be established institute in the summer of 2009 and was officially appointed AISSR director in January 2010. Under Hardon's leadership, the institute has grown to become one of the largest and most important in Europe. The Times Higher Education Rankings named the AISSR ‘the most important social sciences research centre in mainland Europe’.|
Number of goals
Burgoon has set a number of goals for himself as director. ‘I hope to cultivate the AISSR's confederal structure, where the programme groups have a lot of autonomy to define and pursue their own scholarly paths.’ He also wants to deepen interdisciplinary awareness across the different disciplinary Departments in which programme groups are embedded. ‘This will not only foster social-science research that is broad in its relevance to both fundamental scholarly and policy debates, but can also make our research theoretically and empirically more creative.’ Lastly, Burgoon hopes to convey the institute's quality and potential to society at large, and to improve the integration of the AISSR's research with university education.
About Brian Burgoon
Brian Burgoon has been Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy since May 2012. He has worked at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) since 2001, first as assistant professor and, since 2007, as associate professor of International Relations. He also serves as coordinator of the Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) programme group of the UvA’s Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). Burgoon earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
About the AISSR
The AISSR unites all social science research at the UvA. The research
programme explores the functioning of modern societies and their
interrelationships from a historical, comparative and empirical perspective.
The research programme is divided into groups with a thematic focus and is
rooted in one or more of the following disciplines:
- Sociology;
- Human Geography, Urban and Regional Planning and Development Studies;
- Political Science;
- and Anthropology.