The hiring season was successful for the Department of Political Science. Kelsey Shoub, Miyeon Song, Elizabeth Conners, and Juan Tellez will join the Department in Fall of 2019, where they will teach courses on public policy, American politics, Comparative politics, and political methodology. Here’s some information about each of them.

Kelsey Shoub's research and teaching focus on the public policy process and political methodology. Using "big data," her research examines policy at both the national and local levels in the US. At the national level, she examines whether framing in policy debates influences what members of Congress do about policy issues. At the local level, she studies how politics, context, and policy shape the role race plays in citizen-police interactions.  She has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities and is a co-author of Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Race and Policing published by Cambridge University Press. She graduated with her PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2018 and is looking forward to returning to the Carolinas after completing a postdoc at the University of Virginia.

Miyeon Song is currently a visiting research scholar in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University. She is completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University, specializing in public administration and public policy. She received an MPP from Seoul National University. Her research and teaching interests include public and nonprofit management, organizational theory and behavior, bureaucratic politics, representation, and research methods. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, American Review of Public Administration, International Public Management Journal, and Public Management Review.

Elizabeth Connors studies how people’s social surroundings influence their political values, opinions, and behaviors. Using a variety of methods—including survey experiments, lab experiments, and various types of observational analyses—she speaks to core and timely questions relating to political behavior, political communication, and political psychology in American politics. Elizabeth’s research has been funded by the Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences and she has received various awards including the John Sullivan Award from the American Political Science Association's Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Sections, the Milton Lodge Award for outstanding graduate student research, as well as various travel grants. Her research is forthcoming in Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, and Political Behavior.

Juan Tellez’ research interests are in the fields of comparative politics and international relations, with an emphasis on themes in subnational conflict, security, and development. He has written on a variety of topics, including peace agreement design and the consequences of civilian victimization for post-conflict transitions. Among other outlets, Professor Tellez’s work has been published or accepted for publication in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and The Journal of Politics.