Dawn Langan Teele

Dawn Langan Teele is a leader in the field of gender and politics. She is author of an award-winning book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (Princeton University Press, 2018), a coauthored volume, Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (Temple University Press, 2020), and more than a dozen peer-reviewed or scholarly articles on gender and political life. Her work on women’s suffrage unsettled the idea that politicians denied women votes because of gender norms, arguing instead that electoral competition and beliefs about women as future voters determined when countries democratized. Her work on descriptive representation revivified debates about the role of family in propelling or curtailing women’s political careers. 

Teele’s commendations include the Theda Skocpol Emerging Scholar Award in 2023, and the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association in 2020. Her scholarship has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Norwegian Research Council, and the World Bank. It has been highlighted in Inside Higher Ed, Foreign Affairs, Boston Review, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Teele is a cofounder of EGEN, the Empirical Study of Gender Research Network, and editor of Comparative Political Studies. 

As an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Teele’s project, “Battle of the Sexes? The Gender Gap and Partisan Polarization in the United States,” will confront the conventional wisdom about polarization, assessing whether men’s increasing conservativism in the face of economic and educational gains for women is driving the growing division in the American electorate.