Michaela Cushing-Daniels

Michaela Cushing-Daniels is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at the Williams School. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public and International Affairs and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Boston University. Her broad research interest is the design and implementation of policy solutions designed to solve systemic, multi-valent problems. Her primary research projects interrogate the discrepancy between the U.S.’s incarceration crisis and the solutions that have been advanced to address it and whether national policy infrastructures, specifically social policy infrastructure, can be mobilized to better address this crisis. Her secondary research stream explores the impacts of electoral reforms on
representation and policy outcomes in U.S. cities.

In alignment with her research areas, her teaching specializations are in American politics and public policy, with additional expertise in quantitative research methods and racial and ethnic politics. She believes the study of politics is, at its core, a creative project, so encourages her students to be imaginative in their approach to her courses through collaborative in-class activities and by incorporating resources from many sub-disciplines of social science. She will be teaching American National Government and the Research Seminar in American Politics at W&L.