Dara Strolovitch

Dara Z. Strolovitch is a professor of women’s gender, and sexuality studies; American studies, and political science at Yale, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She received her B.A. in political Sscience from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in political Sscience from Yale. She taught previously at the University of Minnesota and at Princeton University.

She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, which examined how organizations that represent marginalized groups advocate on behalf of their intersectionally marginalized constituents. Affirmative Advocacy received the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, the Leon Epstein Award for the best book on political organizations and parties, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize.  

Strolovitch’s second book, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America, examines the relationship between episodic hard times and the kinds of ongoing and quotidian hard times that structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups. It does so by unpacking the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis, in part through an exploration of the raced and gendered politics of credit, debt, subprime lending, and housing foreclosures. When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People won the award for the best book on race, ethnicity, and politics from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association and a 2024 Choice Award for outstanding academic title.

Her work also appears in several edited volumes, as well as in journals including the Journal of Politics; Perspectives on Politics; the American Journal of Sociology; the National Women’s Studies Association Journal; Social Science Quarterly; American Behavioral Scientist; Politics & Gender; Political Research Quarterly; the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy; PS: Political Science & Politics; the Du Bois Review; Health Affairs; and Politics, Groups, & Identities. She also co-edited (with Burdett Loomis and Peter Francia) the CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying.

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowship from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University, the World Health Organization, and Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She received the 2018 Outstanding Career Award from the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus and is co-recipient of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science’s Mansbridge Award, given “to extraordinary individuals who perform service above and beyond the call of duty … to advance opportunities for women.”  She was founding associate editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and served as co-editor of the American Political Science Review (2020-2024). With Allison Harris, she serves as co-director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social & Policy Studies.