2026 IU Center on American Politics Conference
Date: October 2, 2026
Location: Oak Room, Indiana Memorial Union // Bloomington, IN
The Indiana University Center on American Politics is pleased to announce its second conference, to be held on the Bloomington campus on October 2, 2026. The conference brings together speakers whose research focuses on a broad range of phenomena in American politics: political behavior, political psychology, media and politics, and public opinion.
Previous conferences: 2025
Speakers
Taylor Carlson is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She studies political communication in American Politics. Her research focuses on understanding the content and consequences of interpersonal political communication. She is the author of Talking Politics: Political Discussion Networks and the New American Electorate, What Goes Without Saying: Navigating Political Discussion in America, and Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy
Elizabeth Connors is an Associate Professor of Political Science and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. She studies political behavior in American politics, and is especially interested in how the social world intersects with the political world. Her work has received multiple awards from the American Political Science Association and been funded by university grants, Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, and the Institute for Humane Studies.
Christopher DeSante is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. His research interests lie in race and racism in America, American political partisanship, and political methodology. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, and other outlets in the discipline. He is currently working on a book about global warming and political polarization.
Shana Gadarian is Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking at Syracuse University, where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Research. Her work centers on explaining how the broad political environment, including elites and the media, affects what types of policies Americans want and how they behave politically. She is the author of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World, and Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID.
Greg Huber is the Forst Family Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is a Resident Fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and is the Director of Yale's Center for the Study of American Politics. He also serves as an Associate Editor for the American Political Science Review. His research focuses on American Politics, and is motivated by a desire to understand how the interactions among the mass public and elites, political institutions, and policies explain important outcomes.
Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research focuses on political marketplaces, including the market for political news, the political media consulting industry, and the allocation of grant funding by legislatures. His work has appeared in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Economic Review, and The Journal of Politics.
Mary Adams Plooster is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. Her research focuses on why American partisans express animosity towards one another, and what political systems and psychological processes contribute to this animus. Her work has been published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties.