Shana Gadarian, associate 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,” said David Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School. “She is the embodiment of a Maxwell faculty 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.”

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 APSA 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 and the 2015 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, awarded to an outstanding non-tenured member of the Maxwell School faculty. She has also received several fellowships and grants from organizations including the National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation.

Gadarian is one of 26 distinguished scholars and writers selected as a Carnegie Fellow from more than 300 nominations. Selections were made by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation that has supported the advancement of education and knowledge for more than a century.

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.