Biography
Erica Czaja-Farough is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Prior to her arrival at Holy Cross, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo, and prior to that, the Director of the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy’s Community Research Institute at Grand Valley State University. She also served as the Executive Director of Camp Blodgett, a youth-centered nonprofit organization based in Grand Rapids, MI.
She earned her Ph.D. in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research Program. She also holds a B.A. (with high distinction) in Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Her research has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. She is also a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Distinguished Junior Scholars Award in political psychology.
Her research interests include American political behavior, political psychology, race and ethnic politics, inequality, public opinion, and health politics. Her ongoing book project, Revolutionary Emotion: How Empathy Illuminates Injustice & Motivates Egalitarian Social Change, examines the effects of empathy for minority individuals on dominant public opinion about minority rights. She has authored or co-authored peer-reviewed research publications in Social Science & Medicine – Qualitative Research in Health, the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society as well as book chapters in the edited volume, New Directions in Public Opinion (ed. Adam Berinsky, Routledge Press, on its 3rd edition).