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. I was trained in an interdisciplinary approach to political science at Cornell by Sidney Tarrow, whose seminal works on social movement studies and theory integrate history, sociology, anthropology, law, and other fields.

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 for download on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/zra5f/.  

During the fall 2024 and 2025 semesters, I taught an undergraduate course entitled “Johns Hopkins: Toward a New Biography of the Founder.” The course explored 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. It aimed to understand Hopkins' life in the context of the highly contentious international social, religious, and political dynamics of the nineteenth century, with a special focus on Quakerism and abolitionism. 

I have published two peer-reviewed articles connected with my Hopkins family research. The first of these papers won the 2022 BCHS award for outstanding writing on Baltimore history and has been published in the Maryland Historical Magazine. The second publication consists of a peer-reviewed dataset and accompanying article for the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, created and written along with four JHU undergraduate researchers.

For those interested in the genealogy of the Hopkins family, you can visit my public tree on ancestry.com. I also frequently present my research at a wide range of venues and never take a fee. Public engagement is an essential component of my duty as a scholar, as embodied in the words of Johns Hopkins University's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman: "...to bring the benefits of discovery to the world."

I am a native of the Pacific Northwest; I have lived in Scotland, Wales, Spain, and Italy, and I am presently a proud resident of Baltimore.

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