Traci Burch
Assistant Professor
PhD, Harvard University
Professor Burch's work focuses on American politics and social policy, specifically quantitative research on race politics, crime policy, and inequality. Her current research examines changing racial boundaries in the U.S., Supreme Court activity of interest groups, and the prevalence of organized interests and their political activities. Burch's dissertation, Punishment and Participation: How Criminal Convictions Threaten American Democracy, won the Harvard University Robert Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science (2007). Burch has been an Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences Research Fellow, a European Network on Inequality Fellow, a The Sentencing Project Research Fellow, and a Malcolm Weiner Center for Inequality and Social Policy Doctoral Fellow. Burch's publication includes "Contingent Public Policies and the Stability of Racial Hierarchy: Lessons from Immigration and Census Policy" with Jennifer Hochfeld in Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen (Ian Shapiro, ed., NYU Press, 2007).