We had two new staff members who joined us. Jordan Vohs is now our new graduate office coordinator and Rachel Rennie has joined our front office and handles undergraduate matters. Our new director of graduate studies for the AY 2026-2027 will be Christopher De Sante, replacing Steven Webster who had served in this important role for the past three years.

Last spring, we announced the endowment of the Charles S. Hyneman Professorship in our department. Charles S. Hyneman (1900–1985) joined Indiana University in 1956 and quickly became one of the most influential voices in American political science. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and produced innumerable articles and many books, including Bureaucracy in a Democracy (1950), The Study of Politics (1959), A Second Federalist (1967), Popular Government in America (1968), American Political Writing During the Founding Era (1983). The gift from Department alumnus Lawrence H. Lee (B.A. '66, Political Science) will support the recruitment of a senior scholar whose work reflects the intellectual rigor and public spirit that defined Hyneman’s career. The professorship strengthens the department’s ability to recruit and retain distinguished faculty and advances its longstanding commitment to the study of American political institutions, constitutionalism, and democratic governance. The announcement of the new Hyneman Professorship was made on the occasion of the department’s annual Charles Hyneman Lecture, given in February by Professor Betsy Sinclair, chair of the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Her topic was “The Persuasiveness of Artificial Intelligence: Can AI Chatbots Reduce Belief in Election Rumors?”

The Center for American Politics led by Steven Webster has continued to field two national surveys per academic year that allow both faculty and graduate students to collect data on important questions pertaining to American politics. The Center’s activities have also expanded to include a yearly conference on American politics held on the IU Bloomington campus. It will organize a second annual conference on October 2, featuring a mix of internal speakers and invited guests from across the country. Visit the conference website for more information.

Our DC internship program continues strong under the leadership of Professor Christine Barbour. The program holds networking receptions for our interns in DC and welcomes dozens of area alums, some of whom mentor our undergrads. At our department graduation ceremony last May, we awarded our Distinguished Alumni Award to J.T. Forbes (B.A. '90), president of the IU Foundation, who gave a heartfelt address on the value of studying political science. “To be an alum,” he told our graduating seniors, is to transition from being the one fed to being the one who feeds—to become a hero in the stories of those who follow you by extending your moral imagination to the generations of voices yet to be heard.” We welcome your nominees for future distinguished alumni award recipients.

After completing the External Review of the department last year, we concluded that we must pay special attention to strengthening our graduate program, which remains a priority on our agenda, along with increasing our research productivity. Our colleagues continue to publish important scholarship and getting prestigious grants. Professor Regina Smyth, a leading expert of Russian politics studying regime change and stability, is spending the AY 2026-2027 as guest of the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University. Among the new publications, I would like to highlight here the books published by Noah Eber-Schmid Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2025), and William Scheuerman, Property Disobedience as Protest: Rethinking Political Nonviolence (Penn Press, 2026), This October, Professor Emeritus Sumit Ganguly will publish a new co-edited book with Klaus Brummer, Transnational Repression: A Comparative Perspective Across Autocracies and Democracies (Cambridge University Press).

We believe that our department has significant potential to grow at a time when liberal education is being redefined across the entire country. Although we are the third largest top department (among others in social and historical sciences) in the College with a little over 600 declared majors, we are still, in terms of the size of the faculty, in the lower half among the Big 10 POLS departments. We want to grow the new PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) Minor and have plans for working with other units on campus on a joint initiative to teach civic studies. A new accelerated master program in data science led by Christopher De Sante will start in 2027. Students are eager to take our classes that address timely and important issues such as the rule of law, authoritarian politics, the vulnerabilities of democracy, and ethics and public policy.

We plan to continue the Chair’s Chat tradition inaugurated last fall and hope to see you then. If you have an interest in joining our Board of Advisors, please do not hesitate to reach out to me or the chair of the board, Professor Matthew Streb (Northern Illinois University) at mstreb@niu.edu. My colleagues and I look forward to being in touch and hearing from you in the months ahead. With all good wishes and thanks for all you do for our department!

Aurelian Craiutu

Arthur F. Bentley Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science

acraiutu@iu.edu