About Ian

I’m an Assistant Professor at Tennessee State University. I earned my Ph.D. in political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder with specialization in American political behavior and research methods. Between 2021-2023, I was Postdoctoral Civic Engagement Fellow at The Brennan Center for Justice.

My research and teaching interests include American political behavior, political psychology, race and voting rights, susceptibility to misinformation, campaigns and elections, and social influence. I am especially dedicated to science communication, understanding citizen attitudes towards democracy reform, and effective teaching of quantitative research methods at the undergraduate level.

My dissertation, The Public’s Relationship With Political Misinformation, explores the social and psychological roots of susceptibility to political misinformation. Its goal is to better appraise whether people are capable of defending themselves and others from “fake news” and other forms of deceptive information. Scholars and democratic theorists have long wrestled with the implications of a democracy devoid of well-informed citizens. That said, structural and psychological prescriptions for mass ignorance found in the literature such as responsible parties (Schattschneider 1960; American political Science Association 1950), collective rationality (Page and Shapiro 1992), and heuristics (Lupia 1994) each carry unintended and negative consequences that keep individuals from making democracy work through good judgment and decision-making. My work looks between individual and institutional solutions - and investigates how social ties and perceptions of one’s place in society help inoculate the American public from becoming misinformed.

         At the core of this project lies an emphasis on the social contexts in which individuals encounter misinformation. I take special care to separate how dispositions, information processing, and social considerations each work to produce more informed or misinformed citizens. I address the problem of political misinformation from a social psychological perspective, noting that social influence is both an exogenous force that acts on individuals (Sinclair 2012) and a consideration constantly driving people to seek, encode, interpret, and share information strategically (e.g., Mutz 1998). 

In my free time, you can find me cycling, baking (mostly chocolate based) desserts, listening to podcasts, cleaning datasets, or keeping up with Political Science Twitter.