Workshop Leader
Benjamin Toff is an Associate Professor at the Hubbard School, Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, and the Workshop Leader (Principal Investigator). He studies public opinion, political communication, digital media, and changing journalistic practices and is co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism (2024, Columbia University Press). From 2020-2023, he was also a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he led a multi-country study of the factors driving declines in trust in news. He is currently working on a new book exploring the role played by opinion surveys in news coverage of politics. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional journalist, mostly as a researcher at the New York Times.
Workshop Participants
Sid Bedingfield is an Associate Professor of journalism history. His research and teaching focus on journalism's role in democratic societies during times of political and cultural change, with a particular emphasis on civil rights and racial politics. He has been publishing peer-reviewed studies in the fields of journalism history and media studies since 2010, and is an expert in historical techniques to connect journalism archives with public opinion data that will be relevant to studying the Minnesota Poll and its historical role.
Elisia L. Cohen is the director of the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is responsible for managing the School's undergraduate, graduate, and professional education, research, service and engagement missions. In her role as Professor and Director of the School she is engaged with Minnesota’s media communities and will support the workshop’s outreach efforts to professional journalists in the community.
Katharine Gerbner is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. Her research explores the religious dimensions of race, authority, and freedom in the early modern Atlantic world. Her book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic World.
Galin Jones is the Lynn Y. S. Lin Professor of Statistics and the Director of the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. He is also affiliated with the Institute for Research in Statistics and its Applications, the UM Data Science program, and chairs the university-wide Data Science Initiative. His main research interests are in Markov chain Monte Carlo, statistical theory and methods in both Bayesian and frequentist domains, neuroimaging applications, and astrostatistics. His collaborations with a wide range of researchers including psychologists, veterinarians, librarians, and ecologists, among others and cross-unit connections will help ensure the workshop reaches wide-ranging audiences beyond CLA.
Andrew Karch is Arleen C. Carlson Professor of American Politics and Chair of the Department of Political Science. He joined the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2010 after teaching for seven years at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on the political determinants of public policy choices in the contemporary United States, with a special focus on federalism and state politics. His most recent book, Responsive States: Federalism and American Public Policy, is co-authored with Shanna Rose of Claremont McKenna College and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. His previous book, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. He is also the author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion among the American States (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Howard Lavine is Associate Dean of the Social Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science and Psychology. His work centers on the psychological underpinnings of mass political behavior. He is the author of Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity and the Politics of Redistribution (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012), and the editor of The Feeling, Thinking Citizen (Routledge, 2017) and Political Psychology (Sage, 2010). He has published articles in The American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He is the past editor of the journal Political Psychology and current editor of the journal Advances in Political Psychology. His current work focuses on human rights, populism, partisan asymmetries, and the intersection of race and political context on public opinion.
Dan Myers is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and completed post-doctoral training at the University of Michigan as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program. His research in political psychology and political communication focuses on how examines how people picture politics – their mental representations the groups, conflicts, and issues involved in collective decision making – and how communication, broadly defined, shapes these pictures. Much of his work studies the effects of new political institutions inspired by deliberative democratic theory. He also conducts research on experimental methods and causal inference in political science.
Rebekah Nagler is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she held the Beverly and Richard Fink Professorship in Liberal Arts from 2020-2023. Her research examines the effects of routine exposure to health information in the media, with a particular focus on conflicting and often controversial health information. She has additional research interests in communication and health equity and is a member of the Collaborative on Media & Messaging for Health and Social Policy. Her work has been funded by agencies and organizations including the National Cancer Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and American Cancer Society.
Affiliated Staff
Molly Blake is a Social Sciences Librarian at the University of Minnesota and serves as the subject librarian for Journalism, Economics, Political Science, and Educational Psychology.
Cody Hennesy is the Computational Research Librarian at the University of Minnesota, where he runs the campus-wide Software Carpentry workshop program. His work focuses on developing library services and support for text data mining research and other emerging literacies in the digital humanities and computational social sciences.
Affiliated Postdoctoral Fellow
Carolina Velloso joins the project as a President’s postdoctoral fellow in race, journalism, media and democracy. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. She researches at the intersection of gender, race and identity in journalism, with particular interests in the professional experiences of women and minority journalists and the representation of women and minorities in news media.
Affiliated Graduate Students
Caitlyn Barrett is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research interests are in political psychology and public opinion. She is interested in pre-adult political socialization and the formation and stability of political attitudes across the lifespan.
George Bagrov is a master's student at the Hubbard School who studies mass media consumers and political influence.
Cydney Grannan is a second year MA student at the Hubbard School. Their research interests revolve around journalism studies and political communication, including journalism sourcing practices, the public’s relationship with news, and how technology impacts news media and political communication. Grannan has presented their research at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference.
Mackenzie Nickle is a social psychology graduate student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research interests are in political psychology, specifically the correction of political misinformation.