Dear Friends,

There is something bittersweet about the end of the academic year as a time for celebrations and departures. Our PhD graduates are heading to positions at Rice, Texas A&M, the University of Notre Dame, Trinity College, NYU and the United States Census Bureau. We are so proud of them. We celebrated Professor Brian Crisp and Professor Alfred Darnell’s incredible careers this spring as they head into retirement. We wish them the absolute best. We will also miss Guillermo Rosas as he heads to Rice University to chair their political science department.

It is also time for us to think about our departmental successes. Professors Carly Wayne and Ted Enamorado earned tenure. We held annual conferences in American politics, formal theory, and comparative politics. We had faculty win significant disciplinary awards: Professor Lucia Motolinia won the Early Career Award from the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus, and Professor Mike Olson won the Emerging Scholar Award from the State and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. This summer we will host another cohort of students into our graduate school pipeline program, WUSTEPS. We were able to successfully recruit two of our WUSTEPS alums into our program last year and another this year.

We’ve expanded the faculty this year to include Carlo Horz, Hannah Simpson, Elaine Yao, Ophelia Vedder, Juan Dodyk and Victoria Shen. These faculty join the cohort we hired last year: Christina Boyd, Lee Epstein, Jaclyn Kaslovsky, Peng Peng, and Michael Strawbridge. These new additions mean our department has grown by eleven new faculty members in just two years. This growth allows us to be uniquely poised as a department to address a set of pressing, global questions around the environment, race, gender, judicial politics, Chinese politics, and authoritarian regimes. As the world around us presents an increasing number of political challenges, we are ready to address them with expert knowledge, world-class research, and the courses to train our country’s future leaders and citizens.

We continue to operate in accordance with our key departmental values of radical empathy and intellectual ferocity. To quote something our dean, Feng Sheng Hu, said recently at a faculty meeting, “with great changes happening in the federal landscape around universities, we find ourselves in a boat on a turbulent sea, in the midst of a storm. The most important thing: that we row in the same direction.” That is, it is more important now than ever that we work together. If you are able to, please consider making a gift to our department to support us as we work to answer some of these pressing political questions. Your support will go toward our PhD students as they work towards their degree or to fund faculty research. You can donate directly to the department here:

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