Allison Schnable joined the O'Neill School as an assistant professor in 2015. Her research explores how people use nonprofit organizations to create solidarity in a globalizing world. Her book, Amateurs without Borders (University of California Press, 2021) examines the possibilities and limits of a new movement in international development: small-scale, volunteer-driven international NGOs. She is also co-PI of the NGO Knowledge Collective, a project to synthesize academic research on NGOs.
Schnable founded and co-directs the O’Neill in Denmark program, a summer course on the nonprofit sector in comparative perspective based in Copenhagen. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) and won ISTR’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2016. Her research has been published in such venues as World Development, Social Problems, Third World Quarterly, and Voluntas, and has been featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Schnable is the recipient of grants from ARNOVA, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, the Tobias Center for Innovation in International Development, and Indiana’s Social Science Research Commons. She has participated in the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society Junior Scholars Forum and was the winner of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
Schnable holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Before beginning her academic career, she served as a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.
