Katherine J. Cramer
Katherine Cramer is the Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their place in it. She is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which she uses methods such as inviting herself into the conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understand public affairs.
Professor Cramer’s award-winning book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, brought to light rural resentment toward cities and its implications for contemporary politics, and was a go-to source for understanding votes in the 2016 presidential election (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She has also published as Katherine Cramer Walsh and is the author of Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and several co-authored books including the forthcoming book with Larry Bartels, The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation At UW-Madison, she is an affiliate faculty member of theElections Research Center, Center for Communication and Civic Renewal, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, LaFollette School of Public Affairs, Institute for Research on Poverty, and Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.
She is also an advisor to the Center for Constructive Communication at MIT, with whom and the affiliated nonprofit Cortico she has served as a founder and collaborator on a human-tech platform that enables people to understand their communities’ life experiences, amplify typically underheard voices, inform public understanding, and drive better policy and decision-making to better outcomes. She serves on the board of Cortico.