About Kathy

Katherine Cramer Walsh (B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1994, Ph.D. University of Michigan 2000) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science,  and is an affiliate faculty member in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, and the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their place in it. She is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which she invites herself into the conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understand public affairs. She is the author of Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It with the members of the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Civic Engagement and Civic Education, Stephen Macedo, Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, Jeffrey M. Berry, Michael Brintnall, David E. Campbell, Luis Ricardo Fraga, Archon Fung, William A. Galston, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Margaret Levi, Meira Levinson, Keena Lipsitz, Richard G. Niemi, Robert D. Putnam, Wendy M. Rahn, Rob Reich, Robert R. Rodgers, Todd Swanstrom (Brookings, 2005). She is the recipient of a 2006 UW-Madison Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and a 2012-2014 UW-Madison Vilas Associate Award.