Nicole P. Marwell is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where she is also Faculty Director of the School's Master's Degree in Social Sector Leadership and Nonprofit Management. Marwell is a faculty affiliate of the UChicago Department of Sociology, affiliated faculty at the UChicago Data Science Institute, and a member of the Faculty Advisory Council of the UChicago Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Her research examines a range of questions about urban governance, with a focus on the diverse intersections between nonprofit organizations, government bureaucracies, communities, and politics.
Marwell’s approach to studying urban governance draws on an interdisciplinary set of insights and tools from sociology, organization studies, ethnic studies, political science, and public administration. She begins with the premise that organizations mediate the historically specific operation of key urban processes such as economic production, public goods distribution, community formation, and democratic representation. As such, organizations provide key sites for the empirical investigation of these and other urban phenomena. She understands cities as complex and shifting sets of inter-organizational relations, and uses qualitative, quantitative, and historical methods to explore how changes in this meso-level of social structure affect urban cohesion, inequality, and exclusion.
Her current research projects include (for more information on each project, click the "Research Projects" tab on this page):
(1) A book project, under contract with Stanford University Press, entitled Impact Isn't Everything: Randomized Controlled Trials and the Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector. Co-authored with Jennifer E. Mosley, Crown Family School.
(2) The Internet Equity Initiative, a collaboration with Nick Feamster, UChicago Department of Computer Science.
(3) The Knowledge Integration Initiative, a collaboration with colleagues at the Crown Family School, the University of Washington, and the University of Indiana.
(4) Emerging Directions in the Data-Society Interface. A report for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Marwell has published articles in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Sciences, City and Community, Social Service Review, Human Service Organizations, Qualitative Sociology, and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Her 2007 book, Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City was published by the University of Chicago Press. Prior to beginning her academic career, Professor Marwell worked in the field of nonprofits and philanthropy, including at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the AT&T Foundation, the Levi Strauss Foundation, and Nike.
She was previously an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at Baruch College, the Academic Director of the Baruch Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management, and a member of the Sociology faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Professor Marwell received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.