Dara Strolovitch

Narrative

Dara Z. Strolovitch (Ph.D. Yale University, 2002) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.  Her research and teaching focus on interest groups and social movements, political representation, the causes and consequences of American political inequalities, and the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

She is currently working on a book about the challenges and opportunities facing advocacy groups in times of national crises.  She is also collaborating on several projects, including research that examines to whom voters look for representation in national politics, a study of the 2008 national party conventions, an examination of attitudes toward the use of post-9/11 interrogation methods, and a project tracing War on Terror policies to policies developed for the wars on crime and drugs.  In addition, she is co-editing the forthcoming CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying. 

She has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, Georgetown’s Center for Democracy and Civil Society, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, and has received grant support from sources including the National Science Foundation, Yale University, The University of Minnesota, The Aspen Institute, the Irving Louis Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Politics, the American Journal of Sociology, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Social Science Quarterly, the Du Bois Review, and Interest Group Politics (7e).  She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (University of Chicago Press 2007), which was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2008 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of U.S. national policy, the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association, the 2008 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association's section on Race, Gender, and Class, and the 2008 Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize awarded by ARNOVA and Independent Sector for the best book on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector that informs policy and practice.  Her work has also received awards from the Midwest Political Science Association, the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action.