CCCR Administration
Dr. Michael Wagner is CCCR’s Faculty Director and the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is affiliated with the Department of Political Science and the LaFollette School of Public Affairs. He is the co-author of Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin (Cambridge University Press) and Political Behavior in the American Electorate (Sage: CQ Press) as well as more than 40 articles and book chapters in outlets such as Science and Journal of Communication. Wagner has published public-facing work in outlets including the Washington Post, TechStream, the Scholars Strategy Network, Vox, and PBS’ MediaShift. He has given more than 350 public talks across the globe about the news media, polarization, and democracy. Wagner is a member of the Scientific Board of Advisors for the General Social Survey, Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, the Founding Editor of Political Communication’s Forum, and has won several awards for teaching, public service, and research.
Dr. Dhavan Shah is CCCR’s Research Director, Faculty Director of the Mass Communication Research Center, Scientific Director in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies (CHESS), and the Jack M. McLeod Professor of Communication Research and Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom Chair in UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. An abiding interest in the intersecting power of framing and social capital has shaped his research on: (1) the influence of message construction and processing, (2) the communication dynamics shaping civic participation, and (3) the effects of computer-mediated interactions on chronic disease management. This work has generated 6 books, 200 articles and chapters, and grants totaling more than $62 million from private foundations and federal governments. He applies conventional and computational social science techniques to study communication in politics and health. His home is in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, with affiliations in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Marketing, and Political Science.
Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe is executive administrative director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He has written three scholarly books, two dozen academic articles, and many public essays on contentious politics and democratization, with particular focus on messaging effects, partisanship, violence, identity, and ideology to inform national discussions. His research on mass politics integrates political science, communication, psychology, and history with a wide range of social science methods. Kalmoe’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other popular outlets. Before joining the CCCR leadership team, Kalmoe was associate professor of political communication and interim associate dean for the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
UW-Madison Faculty Affiliates
Dr. Sijia Yang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is the Associate Director of the Mass Communication Research Center, the faculty Director of the Computational Approaches and Message Effects research group, and a faculty affiliate of the UW-Madison Prevention Research Center. His research applies computational methods (e.g., text mining, web-based experiments, causal machine learning) to the study of message effects and persuasion on digital media, including misinformation correction, multimodal health message effects, and community-engaged health communication interventions. He has published more than 20 articles and book chapters in top journals and conference proceedings in communication, public health, and computational social science. As an early-career scholar, he has already received support totaling over $6 million from private foundations and federal government agencies such as Poynter, NSF, and CDC. He won the Abby Prestin Dissertation of the Year and a Top Paper award from the International Communication Association, and an exceptional service award from UW-Madison.
Dr. Katherine J. Cramer is Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which she uses methods such as inviting herself into the conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understand public affairs. Her award-winning book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, brought to light rural resentment toward cities and its implications for contemporary politics (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She is co-author of Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin (Cambridge: 2022). She currently co-chairs the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Commission on Reimagining the Economy and is one of the founders of the Local Voices Network, a human-tech network for constructive communication operated by Cortico. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.
Dr. Lew Friedland is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Dept. of Sociology (affiliated) UW-Madison. He is Founding Co-PI Emeritus of the Center for Communication and Civil Renewal and lead author of Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin (Cambridge: 2022). Most recently, he has published “Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century, Wells, C. and Friedland, (Political Communication, 2023) and “The Public Sphere and Contemporary Lifeworld: Reconstruction in the Context of Systemic Crises,” Friedland and R. Kunelius, (Communication Theory, 2023). Friedland continues his research with CCCR, and is Senior Advisor for Civic Media, a new statewide radio network and Filter Labs, a new predictive opinion company.
Dr. Jon Pevehouse is the Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. His research interests lie in international relations, international political economy, foreign policy, international organizations, and political methodology. His work examines the relationship between domestic and international politics. Topics on which he has recently published include trade policy, human rights institutions, exchange rate politics, and international organizations. He has written on time series methodology including applications in political science, international relations, journalism, and mass communications. From 2012-2017, he was the editor of International Organization, the leading journal in international relations. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Political Economy and co-editor of the Cambridge Elements Series in International Relations. In 2009, he received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association, an award given to a scholar under 45 who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations.
Dr. Demis Glasford is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His program of research falls into three central areas: (1) understanding how people make decisions about whether or how to respond to injustice befalling others, (2) how to improve relations between groups of differing power, and (3) exploring when and why people engage in collective action to resist a subordinated position within a given social system. In addition, he has an interest in the psychology of democracy—that is, the individual-level and group-based factors that support and stand in the way of healthy democratic systems. Drawing on a cultural anthropological perspective, his work assumes different cultures live in distinct worlds—suggesting multiple objective realities. His empirical approach is interdisciplinary, rooted in a contextual understanding of identity, using multiple methods to examine the psychological processes that explain variance in humans creating and relating to their social world.
Dr. Karl Rohe is a Professor in UW’s Department of Statistics at UW-Madison.
Dr. William A. Satheres is a Professor in UW’s College of Engineering at UW-Madison.