Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development, and Co-Director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She also serves as one of the editors of Socio-Economic Review, as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association and as Treasurer of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. She has served as Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and as Equity Advisor to Dean in Social Sciences at UCI. Professor Bandelj received her PhD degree from Princeton University and her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize from Society for Comparative Research. She is an elected member of an honorary Sociological Research Association, recipient of the Distinguished Mid-Career Award for Service from the UCI Senate and Dynamic Womxn Award for Academic Achievement. She holds a lifetime appointment as Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.

Professor Bandelj’s research is in the field of economic sociology and examines how social, political and cultural forces shape economic processes, with a special focus on postsocialist transformations, globalization and financialization. She has received grants from the American National Science Foundation, the European Union’s Commission on Research, American Council of Learned Societies and MacArthur Foundation, among others. She has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, in Cologne, Germany, and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, in Florence, Italy. She is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Nina Bandelj has published more than sixty chapters and articles in scholarly journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Theory and Society, and Socio-Economic Review. Her six books include From Communists to Foreign Capitalists (2008); Economic Sociology of Work (2009); Economy and State (with Elizabeth Sowers, 2010); The Cultural Wealth of Nations (with Frederick F. Wherry, 2011); Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged (with Dorothy Solinger, 2012); and Money Talks (with Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana A. Zelizer, 2017, paperback 2020, translation in Chinese forthcoming in 2021). 

Bandelj has been affiliated with IEDC-Bled School of Management since 1993, first as a research fellow and lecturer, and since 2003 as a visiting professor. Currently she teaches the required doctoral course on Research Design and Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences.