Institute Co-Directors
David P. Redlawsk (Ph.D., Rutgers, 1997; MBA, Vanderbilt, 1982; AB, Duke, 1980) is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on the emotional responses of voters to campaign information. Redlawsk also studies citizens’ views of political corruption. Teaching includes Local Politics, Voting Behavior, Political Psychology, and Decision Making. While incorporating a "hands-on" component in most courses, the Local Politics class has become a fully engaged course, where students combine work in the classroom and the community into a better understanding of the role of politics in our communities. Dr. Redlawsk has recently received a UI Instructional Improvement Grant and a CLAS Curriculum Development Grant to create a service-learning focused course on survey research. Recent publications include two books published in 2006, How Voters Decide: Information Processing in an Election Campaigns, by Cambridge University Press and an edited volume, Feeling Politics: Emotion in Political Information Processing by Palgrave-Macmillan. Dr. Redlawsk has significant experience in local government, having served as chair of a planning commission and as an elected official in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Teresa Mangum (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990; M.A., North Carolina State University, 1979, B.S., Appalachian State University, 1976) is Associate Professor of English who studies British Victorian literature and culture, particularly the ways that popular fiction helped Victorians to negotiate social change. This interest in social transformation prompted two current projects. The first asks how anxieties about aging find their way into literature and art; the second project turns to film as well as fictional human and animal relationships. She is the author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (University of Michigan Press, 1998) and is presently completing a second book, "The Victorian Empire of Old Age." In 2005, Mangum was awarded the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2006, she received the Humane Society of the U.S. Animal and Society Course Award for Innovation for a service-learning course, “Capturing Animals,” in which students worked in the local animal shelter as well as attending class. At the Obermann Center, she has served as co-director of an Advanced Studies Summer Seminar, “Late Life: Representations, Perceptions, Possibilities” and co-director of an Interdisciplinary Research Semester, “Articulating the Animal.” A past board member of the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, she presently serves on the boards of the Women's Resource and Action Center and the Friends of the Animal Center.