Claudine Gay

Claudine Gay is a political scientist and university administrator. On July 1, 2023 she will become the 30th and first Black President of Harvard University. She serves as Harvard's Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies, and Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

Early life and education

Gay grew up the child of Haitian immigrants to the United States; her parents met in New York as students (her mother studying nursing and her father engineering.) Gay is a cousin of writer Roxane Gay.

Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York, then in Saudi Arabia where her father worked for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Her mother was a registered nurse. Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, then studied economics at Stanford University, receiving the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis in economics. She graduated in 1992. Gay then earned her Ph.D. (1998) from Harvard, winning the university's Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.

Career

Gay served as assistant professor, then associate professor in Stanford's Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006. In the 2003-2004 academic year, Gay was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She subsequently moved to Harvard University and in July 2015, she became Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. In July 2018, she was named the Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to assume the post August 15.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, politics of race and identity, and voter turnout, among other topics.

She is vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association.

Since 2017, Gay has also served as a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy.

On December 15, 2022, Harvard announced that Gay had been selected as the 30th president of Harvard University, with her term beginning on July 1, 2023. She will be Harvard’s first black president.

Works

* 1998, with Katherine Tate. “Doubly Bound: The Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women”. ''Political Psychology'' 19 (1).
* 2001. “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation”. ''American Political Science Review'' 95 (3).
* 2001. ''The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California.'' San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California.
* 2002. “Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship Between Citizens and Their Government”. ''American Journal of Political Science'' 46 (4).
* 2004. “Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes”. ''American Political Science Review'' 98 (4).
* 2006. “Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos”. ''American Journal of Political Science'' 50 (4) : 997.
* 2007. “Legislating Without Constraints: The Effect of Minority Districting on Legislators' Responsiveness to Constituency Preferences”. ''The Journal of Politics'' 69 (2) : 456.
* 2012. “Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment”. ''Urban Affairs Review'' 48 (2) : 147-179.
* 2013, ed. with Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Jennifer Hochschild, Michael Jones-Correa. ''Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation'' (Oxford University Press, 2013).
* 2014. “Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship”. ''Political Behavior'' 36 : 99-124.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gay, Claudine
Living people
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Stanford University alumni
Harvard University faculty
American women political scientists
American political scientists
Black studies scholars
Phillips Exeter Academy alumni
Harvard University administrators
American people of Haitian descent
African-American academics
American women academics
American academic administrators
African-American educators
Year of birth missing (living people)
21st-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women