I am a Professor of Political Science and the C. Robert and Margaret Hanley Family Director of the Washington Program at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach and write about American politics, political parties, gender and politics, and American political development.

In my most recent book, See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People (Chicago 2025), David E. Campbell and I find that women candidates shape adolescents’ beliefs about women’s capacity for governance and representative democracy, as well as their engagement with American politics. My next book, a collaboration with other faculty and graduate students through the Representation of Women Lab, is Gender and Local Political Ambition, forthcoming from Cambridge Elements in Gender & Politics.

Much of my work focuses on the consequences of women’s suffrage. My current projects include an investigation, with Mirya Holman and Michael P. Olson, into the impact of women’s suffrage and women’s organizing on state legislative politics, civic culture, and other aspects of American political development. My earlier work with J. Kevin Corder on the impact of women voters on American elections produced two books: A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections since Suffrage (Cambridge 2020) and Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal (Cambridge 2016). Both books received the APSA’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics. You can find more about our work on women voters, as well as essays, interviews, and reviews, here.

My first book, The Politics of Women’s Rights (Princeton 2000), explains how coalition-management and issue framing led to the polarization of the major American parties on women’s rights issues, such as abortion and the ERA, in the second half of the 20th century. I have published articles on such topics as party change and women’s representation in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Behavior.

I teach undergraduate courses on American government, political parties, and gender, politics, & power. For the latter, you can find my collected Moments of Gender here.