Sarah E. Igo serves as Executive Director of the National Fellowship on the Future of Liberal Education. She is the Andrew Jackson Chair of American History at Vanderbilt University, with affiliate appointments in Law, Political Science, and Sociology. Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

A scholar of modern U.S. cultural and intellectual history, she teaches and writes about the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the public sphere. Igo has authored two award-winning books, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (2018) and The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2007). She is also the co-editor of How the New Deal Was Run (2027) and the co-author of a leading U.S. history textbook, The American Promise. Igo has been deeply involved in projects to reinvigorate liberal education nationally. 

As Dean of Strategic Initiatives, she led a far-reaching curricular reform at Vanderbilt that launched in 2025, the A&S College Core. She is currently the Faculty Director of Dialogue Vanderbilt, the university’s cross-campus initiative to promote open inquiry and better conversations, and heads The Dialogue CoLab, a national coalition of campuses dedicated to spreading excellent civil dialogue practices. At Vanderbilt, she served as the inaugural Faculty Head of E. Bronson Ingram College and the director of the Program in American Studies.