Featured Faculty

Our faculty members are on the cutting edge of research in all of the sub-fields of political science. Their publications drive understandings of theory, define historical context, and set the stage for research done around the world. Here is a sample of our featured faculty members and the work and research they do.

Political Psychology

Paul Goren

Professor Paul Goren is a scholar and teacher of American voting behavior, public opinion, and political parties. His current research centers around the politics of abortion & LGBT rights, how basic values affect public opinion, racial prejudice & support for the welfare state, and issue-driven party sorting.

His recent monograph, Stronger Issues, Weaker Predispositions: Abortion, Gay Rights, and Authoritarianism, examines the theory long held by political psychologists that authoritarianism structures the positions people take on cultural issues and their party ties. He presents the argument that authoritarianism is durable, unlike the attitudes most people hold on most issues. However, this is not true of the issues that have driven America's long running culture war: abortion and gay rights, demonstrating that moral issue attitudes are stronger than authoritarianism.

Using data from multiple sources over the period of 1992-2020, Professor Goren's research shows that moral issue attitudes endure longer than authoritarianism, moral issues predict change in authoritarianism, authoritarianism does not systematically predict change in moral issues, and moral issues have always played a much greater role structuring party ties than authoritarianism.

Political Theory

Arash Davari

Professor Arash Davari joined the Department of Political Science in Fall 2022. Professor Davari, born in Iran a few years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, believes that the event shaped a significant portion of his life and career path in political science. "I've spend most of my life in environments and contexts where politics is present, even when it's not explicitly present," he reflected. "And the legacies of the revolution are present, even when they're not explicitly present."

Being a scholar of political science allows Davari to dissect and analyze questions of political dynamics. He is particularly interested in questions of form, examining the ways in which things are presented in addition to their contexts. Davari applies these questions of form and rhetoric to approach his research.

One of his research objectives "is to have the 1979 revolution in Iran considered as offering something distinct and worthwhile for political theorists to consider when they talk about revolution and the impact it has on our daily political lives." Political theorists typically draw a line between the 1979 revolution in Iran and those that followed because of the difference in their substance and theme; however, Davari's approach is to pay attention to form.

Read more about Revolutions, Politics, and the Now.

Comparative Politics

Kathleen Collins

Professor Kathleen Collins believes in using her scholarship, through public engagement, to promote the values of democracy, whether at home or in Eurasia. Her courses and research center around Central Asia, Soviet history & politics, Russian politics, nationalism, ethnic conflict, Islamist movements & politics, and religion & politics. She was awarded the College of Liberal Arts "Red" Motley Teaching Award in 2024.

Her new book, Politicizing Islam in Central Asia: From the Russian Revolution to the Afghan and Syrian Jihads, is a sweeping history of Islamism in Central Asia, from the Russian Revolution to the present, through Soviet-era archival documents, oral histories, and a trove of interviews & focus groups. The interdisciplinary study offers a new interpretation of Islamism's causes and offers rich insights for policy makers & human rights activists. Watch Professor Collins discuss her new book.

Furthermore, Professor Collins has participated in outreach in support of Ukraine through various speeches and op-eds. She also hosted a panel discussion on Ukraine, sponsored by the Department of Political Science, with colleagues from Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics, in November 2023.

Kevin Luo

Kevin Luo joined the Department of Political Science in Fall 2023 as an assistant professor in the comparative politics subfield. He was born in Oklahoma, but spent his formative years in Canada and Taiwan, then returned to the US for college. Spending his youth in various places helped Professor Luo appreciate the value of thinking about the world through a comparative lens, particularly the ways in which power is manifested and its various permutations across different historical and national contexts.

Professor Luo is primarily a scholar of Chinese politics, with a focus on how the historical past continues to shape and inform the political present. He is also interested in East Asia, from issues related to authoritarianism & democracy, development & inequality, civil society, and security & geopolitical issues. His current research project examines the emergence of rural state building projects after state formation, and land reform's impact on regimes and political orders.

International Relations

Tanisha Fazal

In her new book, Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War, Professor Tanisha Fazal explores how the US is systematically underestimating the costs of war. She explores how policymakers—and the public—think about the costs of war: almost exclusively in terms of fatalities and financial costs in terms of war materiel. However, she sheds light on how the improvements in military medicine and expansion of the veterans' benefits system have increased the long tail of the costs of war in underappreciated ways.

Professor Fazal's research tends to focus on questions of change in the international system, with this project paying particular attention on technological change in military medicine. For her next project, she will continue to focus on technological change, but this time with regard to climate change, which she see's as the existential crisis of our time.

Ron Krebs

Ron Krebs was named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2024, an award rewarding outstanding faculty on the basis of merit, research, accomplishments, leadership activities, and other factors.

His research begins with real-world puzzles and consequences that trouble him. Professor Krebs shows that rhetorical battles over national security are not a side show diverting attention from the "real" drivers of policy. He hopes to "shape some of our public debates, introduce new ideas, and elevate our public discourse."

Professors Krebs' current research begins with a puzzle about militarism: how people around the world talk about soldiers as though they are the best of us, as though they enlist always out of idealism and patriotism, yet are recruited on the open labor market. He seeks answers to why people so often worship soldiers and what the consequences are for this disconnect between the reality of military recruitment and the romanticized ideal.

American Politics

Tim Johnson

Horace T. Morse Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law Tim Johnson is both a scholar of the Supreme Court and advisory committee member of the Brown Revisited project.

Brown Revisited is an interactive multimedia archive website that utilizes AI audio to make the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) took place one year before audio recordings were allowed in the court. Using the actual transcripts from the case and voice actors, as well as snippets of real, historical recordings from the Supreme Court Justices and attorneys, project members were able to clone their voices and overlay them using AI, bringing history to life.

"We're not trying to fake you out and make Thurgood Marshall say something he never said. We just want to put his voice to something he actually said so you can hear him during a time in history when you, quite literally, couldn't hear him," said Professor Johnson. Being able to hear the case has helped Johnson and his students better understand the case. This technology could change not only the ways in which history and law are taught, but also the ways in which we think about how we should deal with these same issues today.

Listen to Professor Tim Johnson talk about the Brown Revisited project.

Methodology

Jane Sumner

In recognition of her methods teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Professor Jane Sumner received the "Red" Motley Teaching Award in 2022. She finds it "really exciting and motivating to teach [students] skills they can use to [fix problems in the world]."

Professor Sumner's research explores questions across subfields that focus on understanding phenomena that disproportionately harm specific groups of people. Most of her research; however, focuses on business and politics, particularly on the role of public opinion.

Her most recent book, The Cost of Doing Politics: How Partisanship and Public Opinion Shape Corporate Influence, asks how public opinion shapes corporate influence tactics and misconceptions about consumer boycotts. Through her path-breaking research and quantitative & qualitative evidence, she explores how corporate influence in politics functions and operates beneath the surface.