Margaret Weir

Faculty Director

Margaret Weir is Wilson Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  Before coming to Brown in 2016, she was the Avice M Saint Chair in Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.  She has also been a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Her research centers on social policy, poverty, and urban politics in the United States and Europe.  In 2020, she was the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government at the Rothermere Institute at the University of Oxford. She current co-directs the Stone Project on Inequality at the Watson Institute. 

Weir is the author and editor of several books, including Who Gets What? The New Politics of Insecurity (co-edited with Frances Rosenbluth (Cambridge University Press); Schooling for All: Race, Class and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (coauthored with Ira Katznelson, Basic Books); Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press), The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (with Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, Princeton University Press); and The Social Divide (Brookings and Russell Sage).  She has written more than 40 journal articles and book chapters.

Weir has received numerous fellowships for her work, including, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She also served as director of the MacAthur Foundation’s Research Network Building Resilient Regions. Weir has served on a number of editorial boards, including Politics and Society, American Political Science Review, and Urban Affairs Review.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance. In 2020 she received the Norton Long Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association’s Urban and Local Politics Section.