Education

My Education and Scholarly Background

I came to political science the way most people come to things that matter — not by plan but by recognition. As an undergraduate at Millikin University, I encountered the discipline as a framework for understanding something I had always found compelling: why democratic politics works the way it does, and why it so often falls short of what it promises. That question has organized my scholarly life ever since.

I completed my graduate training at the University of Missouri, earning my Master of Arts in 1995 and my Ph.D. in 2002. Missouri gave me rigorous methodological training, a cohort of collaborators I have worked with across my entire career, and a set of substantive interests — American political parties, state legislative campaigns, political communication, and voting behavior — that have proven durable across twenty-plus years of research and teaching. My dissertation work and early publications focused on campaign finance and state legislative elections, situating me at the intersection of party politics and electoral behavior at a level of government that receives far less scholarly attention than it deserves.

Parties, Campaigns, and Communication

My scholarly identity as a political scientist has always lived at the intersection of three related questions: how parties organize and recruit candidates, how campaigns communicate with voters, and how citizens receive and process political information. Those questions have produced a body of work spanning state legislative campaign finance, the unintended consequences of primary election reform, the rise of anti-expertise populism, and the role of digital media in reshaping political communication. My textbook American Government: Democracy's Enduring Challenge, now in its ninth edition with Kendall Hunt, reflects a career-long commitment to making the findings of political science accessible to students who are encountering the discipline for the first time.

The through-line in all of this work is a preoccupation with the health of democratic participation — with the structural conditions that make it easier or harder for citizens to engage meaningfully in self-governance. That preoccupation is not incidental to my administrative work. It is the intellectual foundation on which my civic engagement programs, my voter engagement initiatives, and my curriculum development have all been built. The Virginia Government Simulation, Highlanders Vote, the Civic Incomes Assessment project — these are not extracurricular enthusiasms bolted onto a research career. They are expressions of the same set of questions I have been asking since graduate school, applied to the students and communities I have the privilege of working with directly.

From Scholar to Academic Leader

The connection between my scholarly formation and my administrative practice runs deeper than subject matter. Political scientists who study parties and campaigns spend a great deal of time thinking about organizations — how they recruit, how they communicate, how they build coalitions, how they manage internal disagreement, and how they sustain themselves across leadership transitions. Those are also, in every meaningful sense, the questions of academic administration.

Leading a department requires recruiting and developing people, building a coherent identity and message, managing competing interests with limited resources, and creating structures that outlast any individual's tenure. The analytical habits I developed studying party organizations and campaign strategy — attending to incentive structures, thinking carefully about how institutions shape behavior, distinguishing between what people say they value and what their choices reveal — are habits I bring to every administrative decision I make.

I did not set out to become an academic administrator. I set out to understand American democracy. It turned out that the best way to pursue that understanding was to build the institutional conditions in which students, faculty, and communities could engage with democratic life more fully — and that doing that well required exactly the kind of leadership that political science, practiced seriously, prepares you for.