Learn about the APSA 2025 Plenary Speakers and Presenters
Democracy in a Reparative Key
Dr. Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Class of 1936 Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Professor Brown is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former Guggenheim and ACLS Fellow, and recipient of APSA’s Spitz Prize and Easton Prize. Author or co-author of a dozen books translated into more than twenty languages, her most recent works are In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (2019) and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023). She is working on a book provisionally entitled Reparative Democracy: A Politics for the 21st Century.
121st APSA Presidential Address: Epistemic Institutions and the Populism Dilemma: Reimagining Political Science as a Vocation during Democratic Backsliding and Breakdown
Dr. Taeku Lee is Bae Family Professor of Government and Faculty Dean of Dunster House at Harvard University. Lee’s teaching and research interests are in racial and ethnic politics, public opinion and political behavior, identity and inequality, and deliberative and participatory democracy. He recently published Race and Inequality in America (Cambridge, 2025, with Zoltan Hajnal and Vincent Hutchings) and his next book, Billionaire Backlash (with Pepper Culpepper) is due in early 2026 with Bloomsbury.
Lee is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the 2024 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. He serves on the Board of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the Board of the American National Election Studies. He previously served on the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau and the Board of the General Social Survey. Lee is also Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for two decades. He is a proud graduate of K-12 public schools, the University of Michigan, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.
Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System? The State of Parties and Democratic Politics on the 75th Anniversary of the APSA Report
Dr. Alexander Theodoridis
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui
SUNY
Dr. Lilliana Mason
Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Katherine Krimmel
Barnard College, Columbia University
| Dr. Alexander Theodoridis, University of Massachusetts Amherst | Alexander Theodoridis is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the UMass Poll. Before joining the faculty at UMass, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, and a senior visiting scholar at the Vanderbilt University Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. His work seeks to understand the ways in which citizens interact with the political world in an era of hyper-polarization. He studies American electoral politics, with a focus on political behavior/psychology, and has methodological expertise in survey methods, experimental research, implicit measures, and design-based causal inference. Theodoridis’s work has appeared in Nature Human Behavior, the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Political Psychology, Election Law Journal, Environmental Politics, The Forum, and PS, and has been recognized with numerous grants, the John Sullivan Award, the Elections Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Best Paper Award, and the Society for Political Methodology’s Warren Miller Prize. He and his research have also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Time, CNN, NPR, The Economist, and many other media outlets. Theodoridis holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a BA in English and Politics from the University of Virginia. Before graduate school, he helped launch the University of Virginia Center for Politics. |
| Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui, SUNY | Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui is an associate professor of political science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany-State University of New York (SUNY). She is also a non-resident Fellow at the Stimson Center and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Centre at LUMS. Her research interests include political violence, political behavior, the politics of religion and ethnicity, voters and foreign policy, and the politics of South Asia. Her book, Under the Gun: Political Parties & Violence, was published by Cambridge University Press and received the 2024 APSA Robert Dahl Award for scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy, the APSA Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties and organization, and the APSA Francine Frankel Award for best book on South Asian politics. Dr. Siddiqui’s work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics,International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Experimental Political Science, among other outlets. Dr. Siddiqui previously worked at the International Crisis Group and the International Organization for Migration in Islamabad and the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. She has a PhD in Political Science from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A. in English from Haverford College. |
| Dr. Lilliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University | Lilliana Mason is an SNF Agora Institute Professor of Political Science. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018), and co-author, with Nathan P. Kalmoe, of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (2022). She received her PhD in political psychology from Stony Brook University and her BA in politics from Princeton University. Her research on partisan identity, social sorting, and political violence in the US has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio. She is a member of the 2024-2025 class of Andrew J Carnegie fellows. |
| Dr. Katherine Krimmel, Barnard College, Columbia University | Katherine Krimmel is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, and was an assistant professor at Boston University from 2013 to 2016. She is the author of Divergent Democracy: How Policy Positions Came to Dominate Party Competition (Princeton University Press, 2024). Her work on political parties, public opinion and representation, and American political development has also been published in American Politics Research, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Studies in American Political Development. |
Contesting the University
Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock
The Ohio State University
Dr. Sara Watson
The Ohio State University
Dr. Michael Tesler
UC Irvine
Dr. Vincent L. Hutchings
University of Michigan
Dr. Agustina S. Paglayan
University of California, San Diego
| Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock, The Ohio State University | Ange-Marie Hancock is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Political Science. Dr. Hancock joined Kirwan in January 2023 after 15 years at the University of Southern California and previous positions at Yale University, Penn State, and the University of San Francisco. A globally recognized scholar of intersectionality theory, she has written numerous articles and three books on the intersections of categories of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship and their impact on policy: the award-winning The Politics of Disgust and the Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen,” (2004), Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (2011) and Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (2016). She is hard at work on her fourth book, The Scope and Vision of African American Political Thought, a book that covers more than 250 years of African American political thought. In 1993, under the mentorship of NBA Hall of Famer Tom “Satch” Sanders, Hancock conducted the original survey research and designed the business model for the Women’s National Basketball Association. The only women’s professional basketball league to succeed in the United States, the WNBA has been in existence for over 25 years. More recent applied forms of her research focus racial and gender equity at the local and regional levels, including leading a racial equity baseline study for the City of Los Angeles and co-chairing an academic analysis of governance reform in Los Angeles. She has also led community-engaged, empirically rigorous data analyses for the Black Experience Action Team (BEAT) and the USC Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board. Her current work includes new research projects on asylum requests by survivors of domestic violence, empirical applications of intersectionality, and The Kamala Harris Project, a nonpartisan collective of scholars dedicated to tracking all aspects of the first woman of color vice president in U.S. history. Born in Columbus, Hancock is an alumna of Thomas Worthington High School. Long committed to community work, she has served on the boards of Community Partners, the Los Angeles African American Women’s Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI), LA Voice, the Liberty Hill Foundation, and the ACLU of Southern California. She received a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
| Dr. Sara Watson, The Ohio State University | Sara Watson is an associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University, with research interests are in comparative political economy and social policy. Dr. Watson is active in OSU’s University Senate, having held the two highest elected faculty positions in the university, including Faculty Council chair and Senate Steering chair. In these positions, she has worked to represent faculty interests in the face of attacks on academic freedom, tenure and shared governance. |
| Dr. Michael Tesler, UC Irvine | Michael Tesler is a professor of political science at University of California Irvine. He is author of Post-Racial or Most Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era, co-author of Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America, and co-author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. |
| Dr. Vincent L. Hutchings, University of Michigan | Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. In 2020, he was also appointed as a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Hutchings conducts research and teaches courses in Black politics, American public opinion and voting behavior, and racial attitudes. In 2003, he published a book entitled Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability, from Princeton University Press. His research has primarily focused on the ways in which political campaigns and the media frame information about racial issues in order to activate and make politically relevant the voters’ sympathies and/or antipathies for particular racial groups. Professor Hutchings has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. He was one of the Principal Investigators of the American National Election Study from 2010-2017. In 2012, Professor Hutchings was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). In 2022, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In 2024, Professor Hutchings (along with Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee) published Race and Inequality in American Politics: An Imperfect Union at Cambridge Press University. |
| Dr. Agustina S. Paglayan, University of California, San Diego | Agustina S. Paglayan is an associate professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton University Press, 2024), which shows how governments promoted mass education to discipline and indoctrinate populations they deemed “unruly” rather than to expand opportunity. Her broader research examines how politics shapes and is shaped by education systems, and has been recognized with multiple APSA awards for advancing our understanding of democracy, autocracy, political economy, political history, public policy, and labor politics. During 2020-21, she served as the founding president and chair of APSA’s Education Politics and Policy Section. Paglayan received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and a Licenciatura en Economía magna cum laude from Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. |