Executive Committee
Eleven women from across political science subfields serve on the WomenAlsoKnowStuff (WAKS) Executive Committee. Their work supports the WAKS mission to promote the work of women for political science.
This includes expanding and maintaining the scholar database, publicizing women's research on social media, and developing and implementing related initiatives and opportunities that further the WAKS mission.
Learn more about each member of the WomenAlsoKnowStuff Executive Committee:
Amber Boydstun - University of California, Davis
Amber E. Boydstun (Ph.D. Penn State University) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She uses lab experiments, large-scale media studies, and manual and computational text analysis to study how issues make the news, the dynamics of “media storms,” and how media attention shapes public opinion. She is author of Making the News (Chicago) and co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (Cambridge), as well as many journal articles. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Political Communication, Journal of Public Policy, the Text as Data Association, and Women Also Know Stuff.
Nadia Brown - Purdue University
Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a University Scholar and Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown's research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women's studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity. Brown’s Sisters in the Statehouse: Black women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford University press, 2014) has been awarded the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ 2015 W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award, 2015 Anna Julia Cooper Award from the Association for the Study of Black Women and Politics, and the 2015 Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion at Purdue University Faculty Research Award. Along with Sarah Allen Gershon, Professor Brown co-edited Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (Routledge Press 2016). She regularly teaches the following courses: Black Political Participation; Black Women Rising; Introduction to African American Studies; and Race and Ethnicity in American Politics. Professor Brown is also the co-lead editor of Politics, Groups and Identities.
Kim Dionne - University of California, Riverside
Kim Yi Dionne is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Riverside and an editor of The Monkey Cage, a blog on politics and political science at The Washington Post. She has also written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Africa is a Country, among other public outlets. Together with fellow political scientist Rachel Beatty Riedl, Dionne hosts Ufahamu Africa, a weekly podcast about life and politics on the continent. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow in Swahili. She is the author of Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa. She collected much of the data used in Doomed Interventions when she was a Fulbright Fellow to Malawi from 2008-2009. Her research has also been published in Comparative Political Studies, Politics Groups and Identities, World Development, African Affairs, and other peer-reviewed journals. For a complete list of publications, see her Google Scholar profile. She lives in Riverside, CA, with her husband and two children.
Samara Klar - University of Arizona
Samara Klar, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy. She studies how individuals’ personal identities and social surroundings influence their political attitudes and behavior. Her book, Independent Politics, (co-authored with Yanna Krupnikov) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. In it, they examine why so many Americans prefer to identify as independent, rather than with a party, and what the broader consequences are for American politics. Her work addresses political behavior and opinion, with a particular emphasis on how social identities and social settings influence people's political choices. Her research appears in lots of different journals in political science, including the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, Public Opinion Quarterly, and many others. Her updated CV is available at www.SamaraKlar.com.
Yanna Krupnikov - Stony Brook University
Yanna Krupnikov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching focus on political psychology, political communication, political persuasion and political behavior. Broadly, her research merges psychology and political science in order to identify points at which new information can have the most profound effect on the way people form political opinions, make political choices and, ultimately, take political actions. Her work has been published in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Communication, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly and others. She is also the co-author (with Samara Klar), of the book Independent Politics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
Melissa Michelson - Menlo College
Melissa R. Michelson (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of Political Science at Menlo College. She is the award-winning author of five books, including Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns (2012), Living the Dream: New Immigration Policies and the Lives of Undocumented Latino Youth (2014), and Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (2017). She has also published dozens of articles in top-ranked political science research journals. She is a nationally recognized expert on Latinx politics, voter mobilization experiments, and LGBTQ rights. Her current research projects explore voter registration and mobilization in minority communities, how to increase participation in the 2020 Census among hard-to-count populations, and persuasive communication on transgender rights. In her spare time, she knits and runs marathons.
Kerri Milita - Illinois State University
Kerri Milita is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Illinois State University. Her research is focused on direct democracy in the U.S. In particular, she studies the relationship between state legislatures and ballot measures. Namely, why have some states placed heavy restrictions on the public's ability to use the initiative process while other legislatures have remained relatively hands-off? She also studies congressional elections, looking at factors that determine whether candidates speak clearly or ambiguously on key issues of the day and how strategic position-taking shapes public beliefs about a candidate's integrity and ability to represent the constituency.
Layna Mosley - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Layna Mosley is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mosley's research and teaching focus on the politics of the global economy. Her ongoing research projects address sovereign borrowing and debt (including sovereign bond issuance, debt management offices, and how governmetns choose among various types of creditors), as well as the link between global supply chains and labor rights in developing countries. Mosley also is interested in the economic and cultural determinants of the anti-globalization backlash in rich democracies, as well as the link between trade agreements and worker rights. .Mosley is author of Global Capital and National Governments (Cambridge University Press 2003) and Labor Rights and Multinational Production (Cambridge University Press 2011). Mosley also is editor of Interview Research in Political Science (Cornell University Press 2013). Mosley's recent commentary on trade, labor rights and sovereign borrowing can be found here.
Stella Rouse - University of Maryland at College Park
Stella Rouse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. She is also the Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizen Engagement and Associate Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll. Her research and teaching interests focus on Latino politics, minority politics, Millennial politics, state politics, and immigration. She is the author of the book, Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which was voted as one of the best political science books of 2013 by The Huffington Post. Her second book, The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (co-authored with Ashley Ross), was released in August of 2018. She has published articles on group dynamics and cosponsorship, religion and ethno-racial political attitudes, Latino representation and education, and Millennials and immigration. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Rouse has presented her work at such forums as the Brookings Institute, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She has also written for such outlets as The Washington Post's Monkey Cage, The Conversation, Reuters, NBC News, and Scholars Strategy Network. Rouse is a native of Colombia. When she was two years old, her parents immigrated to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where she grew up. She fluently speaks, reads, and writes Spanish.
Kathleen Searles - Louisiana State University
Assistant Professor of Political Communication, Kathleen Searles, holds a joint appointment in the Manship School of Mass Communication and the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. Her interests include news media, campaign advertising, and political psychology. Specifically, her research examines the content of partisan news, poll coverage, and the influence of emotional appeals in campaign ads. Most recently her work focuses on using bio-metrics to better understand the effects of political television ads and direct mail. She has published in Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Political Communication, The Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Political Psychology.
Christina Wolbrecht - University of Notre Dame
Christina Wolbrecht is professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Her areas of expertise include American politics, women and gender, women's suffrage, political parties, and American political development. Much of Wolbrecht's current work focuses on women voters since suffrage. Wolbrecht is the co-author (with J. Kevin Corder) of the forthcoming book, A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage, which describes and explains how women have voted since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 and is intended for scholars, journalists, and students. She also is the author of Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal (with Corder, Cambridge 2016) and of The Politics of Women's Rights: Explaining Party Change (Princeton 2000), as well as other articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on women as political roles models, women and representation, party position-taking, and democratic inclusion. Wolbrecht and Susan Franceschet are the co-editors of the journal Politics & Gender (2019-2022).
Advisory Members
Emily Beaulieu, University of Kentucky
Andra Gillespie, Emory University
Contact
All questions about WomenAlsoKnowStuff can be sent to contact@womenalsoknowstuff.com
Funding
WomenAlsoKnowStuff has received funding from the Democracy Fund, the National Science Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the European Conference on Politics and Gender, the International Studies Association, and the Southern Political Science Association.