ABOUT THE TEAM

Nadia E. Brown

Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a University Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. Professor Brown will join the faculty at Georgetown University in Fall 2021 as the Director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program and Full Professor Government. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity. Brown’s Sisters in the Statehouse: Black women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2014) has been awarded the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ 2015 W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award, 2015 Anna Julia Cooper Award from the Association for the Study of Black Women and Politics, and the 2015 Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion at Purdue University Faculty Research Award. Along with Sarah Allen Gershon, Professor Brown co-edited Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (Routledge Press 2016). Professor Brown is the lead editor of Politics, Groups and Identities. 

She is active in the American Political Science Association, serving as chair of the Ralph Bunche Advisory Committee, on the Thelen Presidential Task Force, and on the American Political Science Review 2019 Search Committee. Professor Brown is part of the #MeTooPoliSci Collective where she spearheads efforts to stop sexual harassment in the discipline. Alongside Elizabeth Sharrow, Stella Rouse and Rebecca Gill, Brown $1M have been awarded a collaborative grant totaling $1,000,794 from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program. The project, titled “#MeTooPoliSci Leveraging A Professional Association to Address Sexual Harassment in Political Science,” capitalizes on the power that professional associations have to model, facilitate, and incentivize change in the climate and culture of the disciplines they serve through a substantial partnership with the American Political Science Association. She regularly teaches the following courses: Black Political Participation; Black Women Rising; Introduction to African American Studies; and Race and Ethnicity in American Politics.

Rebecca D. Gill

Rebecca D. Gill is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She is a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She earned her doctorate in political science at Michigan State University in 2008. 

Dr. Gill’s recent research focuses on gender, politics, and courts. Her work on judges and judicial institutions focuses on courts in the United States and Australia. She is the recipient of a multi-year National Science Foundation grant to study gender and race bias in performance evaluations of state judges. She is working on collaborative research projects involving judicial behavior on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the High Court of Australia. Dr. Gill’s research interests also include state law, state judicial selection, and comparative judicial institutions and behavior. 

Dr. Gill is co-author of Judicialization of Politics: The Interplay of Institutional Structure, Legal Doctrine, and Politics on the High Court of Australia (Carolina Academic Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Georgetown Law Journal; Law & Society Review; State Politics & Policy Quarterly; the Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy; the Ohio State Law Journal; and Politics, Groups, and Identities. Her work has been featured in a number of popular outlets, like the Washington Post, the LSE USCenter’s American Politics and Policy Blog, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

Stella M. Rouse

Stella M. Rouse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics, Director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and Associate Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Rouse’s research and teaching interests focus on Millennial politics, Latino politics, minority politics, state politics, civic engagement, and immigration. She is the author of two books: Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which was voted as one of the best political science books of 2013 by The Huffington Post; The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (co-authored with Ashley Ross) (University of Michigan Press, 2018). She has published articles on Millennials and their attitudes about climate change and immigration, the role of partisanship on climate change beliefs, the effect of electoral structures on minority representation, religion and ethno-racial political attitudes, and Latino representation and education.

Dr. Rouse’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She has presented her work at such forums as the Brookings Institute, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She has also written for such media outlets as The Washington Post, The Hill, Reuters, Lawfare and The Conversation. Rouse is an editorial board member of the journals, Political Behavior and Social Science Quarterly and the initiative, “Women Also Know Stuff.” She is also a fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute, in Washington D.C.

Dr. Rouse has worked to create gender, race, and ethnic parity within her department, university and the profession at-large, as well as to provide an inclusive environment for marginalized and at-risk populations. She initiated the creation of a department level committee for diversity, equity, and inclusion. She was the co-recipient of the 2019 Jane Mansbridge Award by the American Political Science Association’s Women’s Caucus for Political Science for advancing the work of the Caucus and opportunities for women.

Rouse is a native of Colombia. When she was two years old, her parents immigrated to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where she grew up. She fluently speaks, reads, and writes Spanish.

Elizabeth A. Sharrow

Elizabeth A. Sharrow (Ph.D. & M.P.P., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of Public Policy and History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in the gendered politics of public policy and how policy has shaped intersectional meanings of sex, race, sexuality, disability, and class in U.S. politics over the past fifty years. She holds a Ph.D. in political science with a graduate minor in Feminist and Critical Sexuality Studies, and a Masters of Public Policy.

Dr. Sharrow’s research interests are in the politics of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the politics of the family, gender and race in U.S. politics, and the politics of college athletics. Her work has been published in many forums, including American Politics Research; the Journal of Women, Policy & Politics; Political Behavior; Political Communication; Political Research Quarterly; Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Public Opinion Quarterly; Social Science Quarterly; the Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science, and in Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics (eds. Julie Novkov and Carol Nackenoff, University Press of Kansas, 2020), among other public-facing outlets. Currently, she is working on two book manuscripts regarding how public policy shapes understandings of sex and gender, and the politics of policy reform in college athletics. Her scholarship is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, the American Political Science Association, the Myra Sadker Foundation, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, among other funders. She, along with her NSF co-PIs, was awarded the 2019 Jane Mansbridge Award from the Women’s Caucus for Political Science, “given on special occasions to extraordinary individuals who perform service above and beyond the call of duty on behalf of the WCPS and to advance opportunities for women in general.” At UMass, she teaches courses on the politics of public policy and gender and race in policy history, and she serves as a faculty representative to the Athletic Council. She also serves on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review, and is the president-elect of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science. Before becoming an academic, she worked as a collegiate women’s rowing coach and is a former collegiate rower.  Outside of the classroom, people generally know her as Libby.

Dr. Sharrow is committed to the work of the #MeTooPoliSci collective to end sexual harassment in academe. She is inspired by the work of other NSF ADVANCE grantees, and the multi-focal efforts of the M2PS team, to compel shifts in disciplinary cultures and motivate policy change. She is dedicated to collective efforts to eliminate the exclusion of transgender and gender non-conforming people, cisgender women, LGBTQI+ people, and all those negatively impacted by gendered harassment within political science.