Professor | Faculty Director
Department of Political Science
Katherine (Kathy) Cramer is the Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at UW–Madison. She earned her B.A. there in the Department of Political Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (1994), and her Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan (2000). 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. Her 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 (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She is also the author of Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (2007), Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (2004),and co-author of Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin with Lewis Friedland, Dhavan Shah, Michael Wagner, Chris Wells and Jon Pevehouse (2022) and Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It with the members of the American Political Science Association’s Task Force on Civic Engagement and Civic Education (2005). She is the co-chair of the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is one of the founders of a human-tech platform for constructive communication operated by Cortico. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. She is also the recipient of a 2006 UW–Madison Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, a 2012–2014 UW–Madison Vilas Associates Award, a 2015–18 UW–Madison Leon Epstein Faculty Fellowship, a 2017–18 UW–Madison Kellett Award, and a 2021-2026 WARF Professorship.