Professor

Jennifer Lucy Hochschild

Harvard University
Political scientist; Educator
Area
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Specialty
Political Science
Elected
1996

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and formerly Harvard College Professor. In 2011, she held the John R. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, and in 2013-14, she was a Fellow of The Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University School of Law. She holds lectureships in the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hochschild was president of the American Political Science Association in 2016-17, and Chair of the Department of Government from 2016 through 2019. She is an Affiliated Member of the Broad Institute. 

Hochschild studies and teaches about the intersection of American politics and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration -- as well as educational and social welfare policies. She also works on issues in public opinion, political culture, and American political thought. Her current research focuses on the politics and ideology around genomic science, and the nature of class-based tensions within racial or ethnic groups in American metropolitan areas. 

Professor Hochschild is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles. Her books include Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics. co-authored with Katherine Levine Einstein.(University of Oklahoma Press, 2015); Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America, co-authored with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch (Princeton University Press, 2012); The American Dream and the Public Schools, co-authored with Nathan Scovronick (Oxford University Press, 2003); and Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. (Princeton University Press, 1995). More Science, Less Fear? The Politics and Ideology of Genomic Science is forthcoming in 2021 from Oxford University Press.

Professor Hochschild was founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and a co-editor of the American Political Science Review. She served as vice-president, and earlier as annual conference program co-chair of the American Political Science Association before becoming President. She is a former member and vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a former member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey. She has received fellowships or awards from the Russell Sage Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, Spencer Foundation, American Political Science Association, Princeton University Research Board, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Mellon Foundation, Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and Harvard's Center for American Political Studies. She served as a consultant or expert witness in several school desegregation cases Her books and articles have won various prizes; she has given named lectures and keynote speeches; and she has won teaching, mentoring, and alumni awards. 

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