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Department of Political Science

Faculty

Christine Barbour

Senior Lecturer, Political Science

Professor Barbour teaches American Politics. She is currently writing an American politics textbook with Gerald Wright.

 

William T. Bianco

Professor, Political Science

William Bianco’s research centers on representation and accountability in American politics and throughout the world. His current projects include the local politics of climate change, the politics of federal grants for scientific research, and majority rule. He is also Founding Director of the undergraduate Indiana Political Analysis Workshop.

 

Jack Bielasiak

Professor, Political Science

Professor Bielasiak’s interests are in the fields of comparative politics, with a special interest in the process of democratization and in electoral and party systems. His major emphasis is on the transformation of post-communist societies in East Europe and the former Soviet Union.

 

Eileen Braman

Associate Professor, Political Science

Professor Braman received her JD from Fordham University Law School in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio State University in 2004. Her book Law Politics and Perception: How Policy Views Influence Legal Reasoning (Charlottesville: University of Virginia 2009) investigates the cognitive processes involved in legal reasoning. In it she explores how policy preferences interact with case facts and accepted legal norms to shape judgments.

 

Edward G. Carmines

Distinguished Professor, Political Science

Warner O. Chapman Professor, Political Science

James H. Rudy Professor, Political Science

Edward G. Carmines is Distinguished Professor, Warner O. Chapman Professor of Political Science and Rudy Professor at Indiana University. He is also the director of the Center on American Politics and the research director at the Center on Representative Government at Indiana University. His research focuses on American politics, especially elections, public opinion, and political behavior.

 

Chinbo Chong

Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

Chinbo Chong is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2019). Her main fields of study are in American politics, political behavior, and race and ethnic politics.

 

Aurelian Craiutu

Professor, Political Science

Associate Chair, Political Science

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Political Science

Aurelian Craiutu is a political theorist who has written extensively on modern French thought and is interested in the history of political moderation. His is currently working on a new project, Letters to Young Radicals, Aurelian has also collaborated to general outlets such as Aeon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Society, the Daily Beast, and The Bulwark.

 

Vanessa Cruz Nichols

Assistant Professor, Political Science

 

My research interests fall within the scope of Latino politics, political participation, public opinion, identity politics and experiments. My dissertation, “Latinos Rising to the Challenge: Political Responses to Threat and Opportunity Messages,” focuses on mobilizing messages and how they might create a more engaged or disengaged citizenry.

 

Jacek Dalecki

Senior Lecturer, Political Science

 

Professor Jacek Dalecki teaches a broad range of subjects, including American Political Controversies, Politics of Terrorism, Law, Classical and Modern Political Thought, and Anti-politics. His primary interests revolve around the relations between society and state, the mechanisms of political obedience, and continuities and discontinuities in political thought.

 

Christopher DeSante

Associate Professor, Political Science

Professor DeSante received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2012 and was a visiting professor at Oberlin College from 2012-2013. He joined the faculty at IU in August 2013 and will teach courses in political psychology, American political behavior and quantitative methods. His research is on race and racism in America, American political partisanship and political methodology.

 

Judy Failer

Associate Professor, Political Science

Professor Failer’s interests lay at the intersection of public law, political philosophy, and ethics and public policy. Her dissertation explored the problem of specifying who qualifies for which rights by examining the practice of civil commitment of the homeless mentally ill. She aims to propose a more adequate justification of why people qualify for rights and full citizenship.

 

Sumit Ganguly

Rabindranath Tagore Professor, Political Science

Distinguished Professor

Sumit Ganguly works on the international and comparative politics of South Asia. He is currently editing (with Eswaran Sridharan) The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy and edits Indian Politics and Policy, a bi-annual, refereed, open access journal for the Policy Studies Organization.

 

Russell L. Hanson

Professor Emeritus, Political Science

Professor Hanson’s interests are at the intersection of political philosophy and American politics. He focuses upon the historical development of liberalism in the United States and its effect on democratic forms of politics.

 

Timothy Hellwig

Professor, Political Science

Academic Director, IU Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany

Tim teaches and does research on parties and voting behavior, the politics of globalization, and European politics. His most recent book is Democracy Under Siege? Parties, Voters, and Elections After the Great Recession (2020, Oxford).

 

Marjorie Hershey

Professor Emeritus , Political Science

 

Professor Hershey’s research and teaching interests focus on political parties, campaigns, and elections. Her research examines the characteristics of party activists, media coverage of political campaigns, and the commonalities among lobbying, framing, persuasion, and the creation of organizational histories by advocacy groups.

 

Jeffrey Isaac

James H. Rudy Professor, Political Science

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He served as Editor in Chief of Perspectives on Politics, a flagship journal of the American Political Science Association, from 2009-2017, and in 2017 was awarded APSA’s Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Public Service to the profession for his work.

 

Ore Koren

Assistant Professor, Political Science

Ore Koren (Ph.D., Minnesota 2018) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, specializing in international relations and research methodology. Koren completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he also obtained a MSc in Applied Economics. Previously, Koren was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College and a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace.

 

Lauren M. MacLean

Professor, Political Science

Chair, Political Science

Arthur Bently Chair, Political Science

Lauren MacLean examines the politics of public service provision and everyday citizenship in Africa. She is writing a book on the politics of the electricity crisis in Ghana and co-editing a book on grassroots climate justice solutions in the urban Global South. ​

 

William E. Scheuerman

James H. Rudy Professor, Political Science

Director of Graduate Studies, Political Science

Director of Graduate Admissions, Political Science

Bill teaches political theory. His most recent book is Civil Disobedience (Polity, 2018). His edited Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience (Cambridge UP) will come out in 2021.

 

Abdulkader Sinno

Associate Professor, Political Science

Abdulkader Sinno is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2002, was a CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 2002-03, a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, and a 2014-15 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. His first book, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2008; 2010 paperback edition) develops an organizational theory to explain the evolution and outcomes of civil wars, ethnic strife and other territorial conflicts.

 

Regina Smyth

Professor, Political Science

Professor Smyth’s research explores the relationship between democratic development and electoral competition by focusing on candidates, political parties and party systems in post-Communist states. Her work is based on original data collection that has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

 

Dina Rome Spechler

Associate Professor, Political Science

Prof. Dina Spechler teaches courses on Russian foreign policy, American foreign policy, comparative foreign policy, force and diplomacy in the nuclear age, the politics of the UN, and international relations. After receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University, she began her teaching career at Harvard, where she taught courses on the USSR and international relations. She then moved to Israel, where she taught at Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University before coming to IU.

 

Steven Webster

Assistant Professor, Political Science

Gerald Wright

Professor, Political Science

Gerald Wright received his Ph.D. in political science in 1973 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been on the faculty of Indiana University since 1981. Before that he taught at universities in Florida and worked as Program Director for Political Science at the National Science Foundation. He has published over fifty articles and chapters and four books.

 

Jason Wu

Assistant Professor, Political Science

Jason Wu is an assistant professor in the political science department at Indiana University. His research focuses on ideology and public opinion in China.

 

Justyna Zając

Visiting Professor, Political Science

European Security Senior Research Fellow

My research interests focus on international relations with special emphasis on international security and foreign policy analysis. In my work – research, publications, and pedagogy – I have been primarily preoccupied with European security, broadly understood, and its Mediterranean and East-Central European aspects.

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