Welcome! I’m Dr. Eric R. Schmidt. In July 2021, I received my Ph.D from Indiana University; in August 2023, I will begin a tenure-track appointment in the Department of Government and Politics at Millsaps College. Prior to this, I served for two years as a Political Science Teaching Fellow at Concordia College, where I designed and taught courses on U.S. politics and democratic citizenship, helped rebuild and renew the College’s pre-law advising program, researched the negative effects of partisan polarization on faculty-student interactions, and received the Student Government Association’s Distinguished Faculty Service Award for AY 2022-2023.
As a scholar of long-term partisan change in the United States, my work explores the (complex and interconnected) dynamics of partisanship, ideology, and group attachments. As a teacher, I seek not just to teach American politics — but also to train students to constructively assess their responsibilities as democratic citizens. And as a participant in the (unwieldy and, often, maddeningly contradictory) project of higher education, I strive to recognize – and celebrate – students’ unique contributions to campus life.
During my Ph.D studies, my research was supported by an IU College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship (2019-2020) and multiple competitive grants from IU’s Center on American Politics; my work has been published in Political Behavior, P.S.: Political Science & Politics, Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, and The Palgrave Handbook of Populism. At IU, I trained undergraduates in high-impact research design through the Indiana Political Analysis Workshop; served as Research Assistant to the Center on American Politics; and served as Project Manager (from 2017-2021) for the Center’s annual participation in the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES).
Eric R. Schmidt, PhD 