CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Professor Stephen Ansolabehere of the MIT Department of Political Science, an expert on American politics, studies elections, democracy, and the mass media.
Among the courses he teaches are Introduction to the American Political Process, Dynamics of American Politics, and Presidential Elections. His current research projects include campaign finance, congressional elections, and party politics.
Professor Ansolabehere was awarded a $93,000 Carnegie Corporation Fellowship last spring to research and write a book entitled The Rise of Money in American Politics. He was one of 12 recipients of grants under a new Carnegie program supporting fundamental research on social change.
Professor Ansolabehere and Professor Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University co-authored Going Negative: How Political Advertising Alienates and Polarizes the American Electorate (Free Press, 1996). They also wrote The Media Game (Macmillan, 1993).
He was selected a National Fellow by the Hoover Institution in 1993, received the 1996 Goldsmith Book Prize for Going Negative, and was awarded a Harry S. Truman Fellowship from 1982-86.
Professor Ansolabehere joined the MIT faculty in 1993. Prior to that, he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1989 to 1993. He earned a PhD in political science from Harvard University in 1989, and a BA in political science and BS in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1984.