Media Advisory

UF experts available for elections season

The following University of Florida sources are available to speak to news media about a range of election-season topics:

Sharon W. Austin

  • polssdw@polisci.ufl.edu
  • Title(s): Associate Professor, Director of African American Studies, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: American government, urban politics, African American politics, African American mayoral elections, rural African American political activism, African American political behavior.

Stephen C. Craig

  • sccraig@ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-2377
  • Title(s): Professor, Director of Political Campaigning Program, Field Chair (Political Behavior), Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: Political behavior, American politics, public opinion and political behaviors, campaigns and elections, attitude measurement, and survey research

Juan E. Gilbert

  • juan@ufl.edu
  • (352) 563-0784
  • Title: The Banks Preeminence Chair in Engineering, UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
  • Areas of interest: Electronic voting systems, information security, database, data science and informatics, human-centered computing.
  • Note: Gilbert is the developer of Prime III, a software enabling voters with disabilities to easily participate in the electoral process.

Lynn Leverty

  • lleverty@aa.ufl.edu
  • Title(s): Senior Lecturer, Associate Director of the Askew Institute on Politics and Society, Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: Public administration, ethics, immigration, women in politics, public policy.

Michael D. Martinez

  • Martinez@ufl.edu
  • (352) 271-2363
  • Title(s): Professor, Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: Political behavior, roles of political conflict in landmark legislation, comparative politics, empirical theories of politics.

Michael P. McDonald

  • mcdonald@ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-2371
  • Title(s): Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: American politics, elections, methodology.
  • Note: Using a web-based, open source software, his org website is helping to depoliticize the redistricting process.

Beth Rosenson

  • rosenson@ufl.edu
  • (352) 392-0262 ext. 232
  • Title(s): Associate Professor, Field Chair (American politics), Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: American politics, state legislatures and Congress, legislative voting behavior, political ethics, corruption, political reform, American political development, media and politics.

Daniel A. Smith

  • dasmith@ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-2346
  • Title(s): Professor, UF Research Foundation Professor, Department of Political Science, UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Areas of interest: Political behavior, state politics, direct democracy, voting rights and elections

Trysh Travis

  • ttravis@ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-0393
  • Title(s): Associate Professor, Waldo W. Neikirk Term Professor, Center for Women’s Studies & Gender Research.
  • Areas of interest: Women and gender issues in the campaign

Phillip J. Williams

  • pjw@latam.ufl.edu
  • (352) 392-0375
  • Title(s): Director of Center for Latin American Studies, professor of political science
  • Areas of interest: Hispanic vote

 

Amy Stein

  • stein@law.ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-0953
  • Title: professor, UF Levin College of Law
  • Areas of interest: clean energy law, environmental law, electric grid governance, energy reliability and federalism.

 

Jon Mills

  • mills@law.ufl.edu
  • (352) 273-0835
  • Title(s): professor UF Levin College of Law, director of the Center for Governmental Responsibility, and former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
  • Areas of interest: constitutional law – including the Florida Constitution – environmental law and legislation. Mills, who had a hand in writing the legislation, is a supporter of the passage of Amendment 2.

Additionally, the following Law School experts are available on the following topics:

 

Conspiracy Theories

Professor Mark Fenster, Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Hazouri & Roth Tort Professor, is author of the forthcoming book The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information and the recent book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. His research has focused on government transparency, regulatory takings and legal intellectual history.

Elections

Professor Darren L. Hutchinson, Stephen C. O’Connell Chair, is the author of Dissenting Justice, a blog focused on law and politics. He has written extensively about constitutional law for leading legal journals.

Professor and Dean Emeritus Jon L. Mills is director of UF Law’s Center for Governmental Responsibility, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and member of the 1998 Florida Constitution Revision Commission.

Gender Bias

Professor Nancy E. Dowd, David H. Levin Chair in Family Law, focuses her research on children and families, race and gender equality, critical race and feminist theory, juvenile justice, fatherhood, and non-marital families.

Racial and Implicit Bias

Professor Nancy E. Dowd, David H. Levin Chair in Family Law, is conducting an in-depth examination of the life course of African-American boys from birth to age 18, as a means to explore race and gender inequalities among children. 

Professor Darren L. Hutchinson, the Stephen C. O’Connell Chair, teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil rights litigation, law and social movements, LGBT rights, and critical race theory. He has written extensively on the Supreme Court’s equal protection doctrine.

Professor Shani M. King writes and teaches in the areas of international human rights, children’s rights and family law, the role of children’s counsel in various contexts, family autonomy in traditionally underserved populations, immigration law, and legal ethics.

Professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, teaches, researches and writes at the intersections of race, crime and the sociology of law.

Professor Pedro A. Malavet’s scholarship focuses on the racialization of Latinas/os generally in the United States and specifically on how that affects the citizenship rights of the largest group of U.S. territorial citizens: Puerto Ricans.

Professor Jason P. Nance is a former public school teacher whose legal and empirical research takes advantage of large U.S. Department of Education data sets to identify factors that put students on a pathway from school to prison. Nance serves as reporter for the American Bar Association’s Joint Task Force on Reversing the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

Professor Kenneth B. Nunn explores the intersection of race and criminal justice. He was a consulting editor for the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Race and Racism and a contributor to the World Book Encyclopedia on race, racism and related topics.