Dara Strolovitch

Dara Z. Strolovitch received her B.A. from Vassar College and her Ph.D. from Yale, where she is currently Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science, and where she also co-directs (with Allison Harris) its Center for the Study of Inequality.  She taught previously at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University.  She was founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and recently completed a term as co-editor of the American Political Science Review.

Her research and teaching focus on the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in American politics and public policy, focusing in particular on inequality and representation in advocacy organizations and social movements, on the history of social science, and on the raced and gendered politics of housing and lending policy.  She has explored these issues in dozens of articles, chapters, and books, including Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (winner of the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, the Leon Epstein Award for the best book on Political Organizations and Parties, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize), which examined how movements and organizations that represent marginalized groups represent intersectionally-marginalized subgroups of their broader constituencies.  Her new book, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America, recently won a Best Book award from the American Political Science Association’s section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and examines the relationship between episodic hard times and the kinds of ongoing and quotidian hard times that structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups, in part through an exploration of the raced and gendered politics of credit, debt, subprime lending, and housing foreclosures.  She also co-edited the CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying.  Her work has been supported by grants and fellowship from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University, the Russell Sage Foundation, the World Health Organization, and Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.