Catherine Herrold

Catherine Herrold (she/her) in an associate professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a senior research associate in Maxwell’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration and a faculty affiliate of the Political Science Department. Herrold has served as a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo (Egypt), Birzeit University (Palestine), and the University of Belgrade (Serbia). She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Serbia, Syria and Qatar.

Herrold’s research centers on civil society, international development, and democracy promotion. Her first book, Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The book uncovers the strategies that Egyptian NGOs used to advance the aims of the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. It was awarded the 2021 Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Book Prize from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).

(Re)Mobilizing the Masses: Youth, Civil Society, and Social Change in the 21^st Century, Herrold’s second book project, studies the role of Palestinian voluntary grassroots organizations, social enterprises and community philanthropy groups in mobilizing citizens for social change.

In a third book project, funded in part by a Fulbright Scholar grant, Herrold is studying locally led development in Serbia.

Her work has also appeared in the journals Social Problems, Middle East Law and Governance, Public Administration and Development, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Policy Forum, and VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.

In 2020-21, Herrold served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Before joining Maxwell, Herrold was an associate professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a faculty affiliate of the Indiana University Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She also has extensive professional experience in the for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors. She has worked for Deloitte, the Urban Institute, the U.K. Parliament, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and the George Gund Foundation. 

Herrold holds a Ph.D. in public policy from Duke University. 

An avid swimmer, Herrold was an NCAA Division III All-American and is a member of the Mount Holyoke College Athletics Hall of Fame.