​​
​Ph.D. Candidate​
Department of Political Science
MIT

jenglish@mit.edu

Welcome!
 
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT. I study American politics with a focus on race, political participation, and political violence. Methodologically, I am interested in the complementarities between ethnographic and statistical methods.

My main strand of research investigates deliberation and political action in the presence of racial divisions. My dissertation, Dilemmas of Accommodation: Diverse Associations and the Avoidance of Racial Difference, uses ethnographic and statistical methods to probe this theme in racially diverse churches in the United States. This research is supported by an NSF/APSA Dissertation Improvement Grant. An article from this project received the 2023 Kendra Koivu Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section at APSA.

I am also interested in the study of political violence and have taken up questions related to violence with co-authors. Some recent and working papers include "The Politics of Sight" (American Political Science Review, 2022, with Bernardo Zacka), and "How Police Behavior Frames Protests" (working paper, with Ariel White and Laurel Eckhouse). 

I received my B.A. from UCLA, where I graduated summa cum laude with degrees in Political Science and Economics. I am a proud (and happily retired) former member of the UCLA Rowing Team, and was UCLA's Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 2018. I am originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland.