Mark R. Warren

Associate Professor of Education

Profile

Mark Warren is a sociologist concerned with the revitalization of American democratic and community life. He studies efforts to strengthen institutions that anchor inner-city communities—churches, schools, and other community-based organizations—and to build broad-based alliances among these institutions and across race and social class. Warren is interested in the development of community leaders through involvement in multiracial political action as well as the outcomes of such efforts in fostering community development, social justice, and school transformation; and is committed to using the results of scholarly research to advance democratic practice.

He is the author of Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, a book on the Texas/Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation, the nation’s most prominent faith-based community organizing network. Warren has directed a national survey of faith-based groups and is coauthor of the study’s report, Faith-Based Community Organizing: The State of the Field. In 1999, he co-organized a national conference on the role of social capital-based strategies in combating poverty sponsored by the Ford Foundation. He is coeditor of the volume published from the conference papers, Social Capital and Poor Communities.

Before coming to Harvard, Warren was an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, where he founded and directed the college’s service learning program. He is currently a nonresident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard, where he is working on a project studying white Americans who are active in the struggle for racial justice and equality.

Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University