2026-27 
Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics

Katherine Cramer
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Katherine (Kathy) J. Cramer is the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her work focuses on the ways that people make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer is known for her refreshing approach to the study of public opinion. In order to figure out why people think the way they do, she invites herself into the conversations of ordinary people, sitting down with them in the places they normally gather, such as small town diners, gas stations, and churches, and listening deeply to their organic conversations to learn how they piece the world together for themselves.

Her innovative approach has led the way in understanding some of the most central issues affecting democracy in the United States and around the world. Her book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016), was one of the first to draw our attention to the rural/urban divide in contemporary politics and is widely considered one of the authoritative works on this topic. 

She is the author or co-author of six books including the 2026 book with Larry Bartels, The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation. She recently co-chaired the American Academy of Arts and Science Commission on Reimagining Our Economy (CORE) and has worked with the Center for Constructive Communication at MIT, and the affiliated nonprofit Cortico, since 2017 to create a platform and approach that aims to improve public understanding and policy making. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.

Audrey Lucero

Professor
CLLAS, College of Education, Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education, IRES, Latinx, Educational Foundations, Curriculum and Teacher Education

Audrey Lucero is Professor of Language & Literacy Education in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Oregon. She is a current co-editor of the journal English Teaching: Practice & Critique. She uses corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers discuss race, ethnicity, language, and immigration. She also has an interest in critical picturebook analysis. She spent winter term 2025 as a visiting researcher at Lancaster University it the UK. Her recent work has been published in Teaching and Teacher Education; Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; Critical Discourse Studies; and The Reading Teacher, among other journals. She is a member of the Literacy Research Association, the American Educational Research Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Children’s Literature Assembly. You can see all of her publications at GoogleScholar.

In her time at UO, she has worked closely with the Center for Latino/a and Latin American studies, the Latinx Strategies group, the Dreamers Working Group, and the Latinx Scholars First-Year Academic Residential Community.