Kiara Hernández Madell

PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Department of Government

1737 Cambridge St
Cambridge, MA 02138

I am a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University and a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration at the Harvard Kennedy School. My research interests are in political psychology and political behavior. Within these fields, I am primarily interested in the effects of macro-level economic transformations, economic inequality, and demographic change on identity, intergroup relations, and political attitudes in the U.S. My dissertation centers the modern-day workplace as a way to understand how individuals make sense of social difference, understand hierarchy, and engage in cooperation and competition, and the downstream effects this has on discriminatory political attitudes and behavior.

Other ongoing projects include understanding peer effects on partisan sorting in the absence of strong ties (with Ryan Enos, Jacob Brown and Soubhik Barari); the behavioral consequences of worker-firm ideological mismatch for low-wage service sector workers (with Danny Schneider); and using variation in representation caused by decennial redistricting to estimate the effect of race on voting behavior (with Jeremiah Cha and Angelo Dagonel).

I graduated with a B.A. in International Relations and German from the University of Pennsylvania. Before beginning my PhD, I spent two years as a predoctoral research specialist in the Emerging Scholars in Political Science program at Princeton University, where I contributed to research on public opinion, voter turnout, and racialized campaign messaging in American elections. My work is generously supported by the American Political Science Association Diversity Fellowship, the Stone PhD Scholar Fellowship, and the GSAS Prize Fellowship. I am an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and a Graduate Student Researcher with The Shift Project. I am also the graduate student coordinator of the Working Group in Political Psychology and Behavior.

I spent my childhood in California, Germany, and, primarily, the suburbs of Houston, TX. I am the proud product of K-12 public schools and a third-generation Mexican American. Outside of the PhD, I enjoy running, playing tennis, and am trying to finally learn French.

Cv (pdf)