I am a Sr. Lecturer and the International Studies Program Director at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. I hold a PhD in government (primary subfield comparative politics, secondary subfield American politics) from Cornell University and have taught courses at SUNY-Oswego, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins University on comparative political sociology, political party dynamics, international education, and qualitative methods. 

My most recent scholarly project - the very reason for this website - explores the life history and Quaker roots of Johns Hopkins, the founder of Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. My co-authored preprint article "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery" was featured in the Washington Post in 2021 and is available to download on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/zra5f/.  During the fall 2024 semester, I will be teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Johns Hopkins: Toward a New Biography of the Founder.” The course will explore the life and legacy of Johns Hopkins – his ancestors, his friends, his Quaker faith, his business career, his philanthropy and what we know about why he decided to found a university, hospital, and orphanage. 

People have asked me how the director of an undergraduate international studies program came to study an American philanthropist and his family's history of slaveholding, religious devotion, and commercial pursuits. There are several reasons. First, slavery is an important part of the Hopkins family story before the nineteenth century. And slavery, of course, was a trans-Atlantic and  transnational system of human trafficking. Second, Quakerism, a faith system that emerged out of the mid-17th century political revolutions in Britain and the dissenter sects that fled to the New World, was and remains an international religion. And finally, abolitionism was a global social movement that dovetailed with Quakerism and related religious groups on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I have two essays related to my present research currently under review. The first of these papers won the 2022 BCHS award for outstanding writing on Baltimore history. For those interested in the genealogy of the Hopkins family, you can visit my public tree on ancestry.com.

I welcome all constructive comments and questions about my research! Please reach out to me at sydney@jhu.edu and/or follow me on X @SydneyVanMorgan.