Monica Prasad

Monica Prasad is an American sociologist who has won several awards for her books on economic and political sociology.

Prasad is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economic and Political Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She was previously a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a 2015 Guggenheim fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of economic sociology, political sociology and comparative historical sociology. , her research investigated market-oriented welfare policies in Europe and their economic consequences.

Education Prasad studied for her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Prasad was awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Grant and, in 2011, received a Fulbright grant to study at Sciences Po in Paris.

Career In 2010, Prasad was a committee member for the Theory Prize, awarded by the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for outstanding books and papers in the work of theory.

In 2015, Prasad was selected as one of 173 Guggenheim fellows, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation-sponsored scholarship.

Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 2023, Prasad was a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.

Prasad is the author of several academic works. In her 2006 book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, she argues that countries' different political climates and policy regimes resulted in divergent types of neoliberalism. Her 2013 book The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty examines why the United States has significantly higher levels of poverty and inequality than other rich countries and the impact of government intervention on undermining the welfare state. In 2018, Prasad's Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution was published.

Prasad is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Awards Prasad has twice won the Barrington Moore Book Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, first in 2007 for her book The Politics of Free Markets, and again in 2013 for The Land of Too Much, as a co-winner with Michael Mann. In 2014, she was awarded the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for The Land of Too Much. This award celebrates the best book published by an ASA member in the preceding two years.