UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Fourteen faculty and graduate students from across the College of the Liberal Arts will receive more than $60,000 in support from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Research in Democracy Support Grant program to advance their work on topics related to democracy.
The grants support projects in the humanities and social sciences that broadly address one of the institute’s four research clusters:
- Democratic dissent, protest and deliberation
- Political and social polarization; discord and division
- Political participation, civic engagement and democratic responsiveness
- Guardrails of democracy
Funds are used to support data collection, research-related travel and other expenses. The grant recipients for the 2026-27 academic year are:
- Gabeba Baderoon, associate professor of women's gender and sexuality studies and comparative literature, for "Making African Publics: New Contrast as an Infrastructure of Public Culture during Apartheid and Post-Apartheid"
- Krista Brune, associate professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American Studies, for "Narrating Dissent and Democracy in Contemporary Brazil"
- Christian Elliott, assistant professor of international affairs, political science, and sustainability, for "From Backlash to Whiplash? How the Politicization of Climate Finance in the U.S. shapes European politics"
- Chi Sun Fong, political science doctoral student, for "Presumed Influence of Online Opinion Leaders in Protest Mobilization"
- Andrew Gilmore, assistant professor of communication arts and sciences, for "Umbrella and Hard Hat Revolution Protestors"
- Elaine Hui, associate professor of labor and employment relations and Asian studies, for "Chinese Irregular Migrants Amid U.S. Political and Racial Divisions”
- Chen-Yu Lee, political science doctoral student, for "To be Silent is to be Complicit: Gwangju Uprising and the Root of Anti-Americanism in South Korea"
- Yufan Ling, political science doctoral student, for "Depoliticizing Propaganda: State-Agentic Narrative against Democratic Participation Under Authoritarian Rule"
- Maya Kerr Coste, political science doctoral student, for "Tracing Democratic Inequality in the Criminal Legal System: A Linked Administrative Data Approach"
- Michele Kennerly, associate professor of communication arts and sciences and classics and ancient Mediterranean studies, for "Lucy & Nina After Haymarket"
- Mfundo Msimango, applied linguistics and African studies doctoral student, for "A Decolonial Case Study of How Teachers’ Educational Histories, Identities and Language Ideologies Shape the Enactment of Language Policy in Post-Colonial and PostApartheid South Africa"
- Daniel Tavana, assistant professor of political science, for "Political Opposition Under Authoritarianism"
- Dara Walker, assistant professor of African American studies and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, for "Black, Aged, and Organized"
- Faruk Yalcin and Jolie Kretzschmar, psychology doctoral students, and C. Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology, for "Contextualizing the Cross-Party Empathy Gap"
Grant applications were reviewed by Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science, Chris Beem, McCourtney Institute managing director and research professor of political science, and Ekaterina Haskins, director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation and professor of communication arts and sciences.