UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Sixteen faculty and graduate students from across the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts will receive more than $50,000 in support from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Research in Democracy Support Grant program to advance their work on topics related to democracy.
The grants support projects in the humanities and social sciences that broadly address one of the institute’s four research clusters:
- Democratic dissent, protest and deliberation
- Political and social polarization; discord and division
- Political participation, civic engagement and democratic responsiveness
- Guardrails of democracy
The grant recipients for the 2025-26 academic year are:
- Jessamyn Abel, associate professor of Asian studies and history, for "Practical Democracy: Cultivating a New Postwar Japan, 1945–1955"
- Lee Ann Banaszak, professor of political science and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, for "Molding the Electorate: How Politicians Advance Voting Rights for Some while Disenfranchising Others "
- Julian Canjura and Merve Özçelik, applied linguistics doctoral students, for "The Digital Polis: Youth Civic Engagement in the Reddit Sphere"
- Jungsik Choi and Ibrahim Enes Atac, sociology doctoral students, for "Is Science a World Culture? Threat and Public Trust in Science"
- Maya Kerr Coste, political science doctoral student, for "Elite Cues, Dehumanization, and Public Support for Political Violence"
- Andrew Gilmore, assistant teaching professor in communication arts and sciences, for "Hong Kong's Democratic Plight"
- Morrgan Herlihy, political science doctoral student, for "Assembly Line Politics: How Judicial Confirmations Changed from Individualized Investigations into a Partisan Assembly Line"
- Brooke Hubsch, communication arts and sciences doctoral student, for “Artificial Intelligence, Public Values, and Deliberative Governance: How Lay Publics Evaluate Technological Changes to Democracy”
- Prakash Kumar, associate professor history, for "A History of Democracy: Disease, Technocratic Rule, and Dissent in Colonial India"
- Asaf Levy, history doctoral student, for "Compensating Displacement: Internal Refugees in Israel, 1948–1977"
- Ian Rowe-Nicholls, sociology doctoral student, for "Divided We Keep?: Evaluating the Effect of Socioeconomic Segregation on Generosity"
- James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, for "The Effects of Normalization of Political Violence on Americans’ Democratic Values and Participation"
- Shuang Shen, associate professor of comparative literature and Asian studies, for "Sonic Publics and the Political Listening in Contemporary China"
- Daniel Tavana, assistant professor of political science, for "Political Opposition under Authoritarianism"
- Elise Wolff, sociology doctoral student, for "Institutionalizing Social Justice in Academia and Beyond: Social Movement Origins and Scholar-Activism in the Interdisciplinary Field of Peace & Conflict Studies"
- Jiaxin Yan, comparative literature and Asian studies doctoral student, for "Remembering the Jeju Massacres: Zainichi Poetry and Social Activism”
Grant applications were reviewed by Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science, and Xiaoye You, director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation and Liberal Arts Professor of English.
“The McCourtney Institute for Democracy is grateful to our donors for making it possible to support the important work being done by faculty and graduate students in support of a stronger democracy,” Berkman said. “We look forward to seeing the results of these research projects and the continued success of the researchers working on them.”