Shana Kushner Gadarian is a 2021 Carnegie Fellow

Shana Kushner Gadarian, professor and chair of political science, has been named a 2021 Carnegie Fellow. As recipients of the so-called “brainy award,” each Carnegie Fellow receives a grant of up to $200,000, making it possible to devote significant time to research, writing and publishing in the humanities and social sciences. The award is for a period of up to two years, and its anticipated result is a book or major study.

Gadarian’s Carnegie-funded project, “Pandemic Politics: How COVID-19 Revealed the Depths of Partisan Polarization,” will investigate the long-term impacts of the pandemic on health behaviors and evaluations of government performance.

“Shana is an impactful scholar whose research is relevant and accessible and informs how policy makers think about a range of decisions,” says David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School. “She is the embodiment of a Maxwell faculty member whose rigorous and high-quality teaching is interdependent with her research and service. Shana is the type of leader and citizen that makes us proud to be her colleague. I’m very excited about this recognition of her work and the continued contributions she’ll make.”

A $53,040 grant from the National Science Foundation funded Gadarian’s research on the politics of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Her co-authored research paper “Partisanship, Health Behavior, and Policy Attitudes in the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic” was cited in The New

York Times. Gadarian’s research has additionally been referenced by such major media outlets as the Washington Post, CBS Sunday Morning and ABC News, to name a few.

Gadarian joined the Maxwell faculty in 2011 and serves as senior research associate for the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. She earned a doctorate at Princeton University in 2008.

Her co-authored book Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was awarded the 2016 American Political Science Association Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology.

She has received numerous awards in recent years, including the 2019 Neal Tate Award for best paper in judicial politics at the 2018 Southern Political Science Association annual meeting.

Gadarian is one of 26 distinguished scholars and writers selected as a Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Gardarian is the third Maxwell faculty member to be named a Carnegie Fellow in the past four years.

Jennifer Karas Montez, professor of sociology and the Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, received the honor in 2018 and Thomas Keck, professor of political science and the Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics, was honored in 2019.