Professional Biography

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Professor of Public Policy.  She has been a Harvard College Professor and Chair of the Department of Government; she holds a lectureship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been the Karl W. Deutsch Guest Professor at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), has held the John W. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress,  and has been a Fellow of The Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, New York University School of Law.  She was President of the American Political Science Association in 2015-2016, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996.

Hochschild studies and teaches about the intersection of American politics and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration -- as well as educational and social welfare policies. Current research focuses on the politics and ideology of societal uses of genomic science,  citizens’ trust in and use of scientific information, and the role of race/class inequality in shaping policies and politics in American cities.  She has also written and taught about public opinion, political culture, American political thought, immigrant political incorporation, and public schooling. Her favorite course at present is on "Power in (Mostly) American Society."

Hochschild is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books. They include Genomic Politics: How the Revolution in Genomic Science Is Shaping American Society (Oxford University Press, 2021); Do Facts Matter?:Information and Misinformation in American Politics, with Katherine Levine Einstein (Oklahoma University Press, 2015); Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America, with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch (Princeton University Press, 2012); Facing Up to the American Dream:  Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1995); The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (Yale University Press, 1984); andWhat's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Harvard University Press, 1981), among others. 

Hochschild was founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and was a former co-editor of the American Political Science Review (2010-2012).  She is a former vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a former member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey. She has received fellowships or awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, Spencer Foundation, American Political Science Association, Princeton University Research Board, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Mellon Foundation, Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard's Center for American Political Studies, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Political Science. 

Before coming to Harvard in 2001, Professor Hochschild taught at Duke and Columbia Universities and was William Steward Tod Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University for almost two decades. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 1979 and a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1971.