Theda Skocpol (born May 4, 1947) is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association. In historical sociology, Skocpol's works and opinions have been associated with the structuralist school. As an example, she argues that social revolutions can best be explained given their relation with specific structures of agricultural societies and their respective states. Such an approach differs greatly from more "behaviorist" ones, which tend to emphasize the role of "revolutionary populations", "revolutionary psychology", and/or "revolutionary consciousness", as determinant factors of revolutionary processes. Her 1979 book States and Social Revolutions was highly influential in research on revolutions, ushering in a new paradigm. Biography Theda Skocpol was born in Detroit, Michigan on May 4, 1947. Both of her parents, Jennie Mae Becker Barron and Allan Barron, were teachers. Her mother wanted her to study home economics at a small liberal arts college, while her father was concerned about the cost of college education. She earned her BA in sociology at Michigan State University in 1969. While she attended Michigan State, she participated in the antiwar movement in response to the Vietnam War. Through the Methodist student association, she went to Rust College, a historically black college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to teach English and math to incoming freshman. Many of the students were from sharecropper families, and were first-generation college students. She called her time in Mississippi observing racism and segregation "life-changing". She then went on to earn both her MA (1972) and PhD at Harvard University (1975). While attending Harvard, Skocpol studied with Barrington Moore Jr. Her first published article, in 1973, was a critique of Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. From 1975 to 1981, Skocpol served as an assistant and associate professor of sociology, at Harvard. During this time, Skocpol published her first of many books, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Social Revolutions in Russia, France and China (1979). Some of her subsequent work focused on methodology and theory, including the co-edited volume