Beverly J. Silver is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on problems of development, labor, social conflict and war, using comparative and world-historical methods of analysis. Her work recasts a variety of issues in a broad spatial and temporal framework in order to identify patterns of recurrence, evolution and “true novelty” in contemporary processes of globalization.

Her most recent book—Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870—won several awards, including the 2005 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association.  The book has been translated and published in numerous languages, including Spanish (AKAL), German (Assoziation A), Korean (Greenbee) and Portuguese (Boitempo). She is also co-author of Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), which won the 2001 Distinguished Publication Award of the Political Economy of the World System section of the American Sociological Association.

Silver teaches courses on social theory, development, labor and political sociology, and coordinates a research group on labor in the world system. She is on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University, and was elected Chair of the Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association for 2002-2003.