The Midwest Political Science Association is honored to announce the creation of a new Graduate Student Travel Scholarship, the “Vincent Hutchings Diversity Travel Scholarship,” to help defray travel costs associated with attending the MPSA Annual Conference.
The scholarship honors the work and accomplishments of Vincent Hutchings, Ph.D., Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Hanes Walton, Jr., Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
Vincent Hutchings is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Hutchings teaches courses in African-American politics, public opinion, voting behavior, and legislative behavior in the US. His research interests focus on the circumstances under which citizens are attentive to political matters and engage in issue voting. He published a book on this topic entitled Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability in 2003 from Princeton University Press. His research also examines how political appeals carried through the mass media can influence attitudes about salient social groups such as racial and ethnic minorities and women.
Additionally, his work has explored how political campaigns can frame information about racial issues to activate and make politically relevant voter attitudes about particular racial groups. His current project focuses on inter-racial and inter-ethnic competition and how elite communications can exacerbate or diminish inter-group conflict. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Political Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, the Journal of Communication and Legislative Studies Quarterly. Professor Hutchings has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, most recently (2009) for his project entitled “Elite Communications and Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century.” In 2004, he served as co-principal Investigator of the National Politics Study, a national survey of Whites, Latinos, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. From 2000 to 2002, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar at Yale University. He served on the American National Election Study (ANES) Board from 2005 to 2009 and took on the role of Associate Principal Investigator of the study from 2007 to 2009.
The scholarship is open for applications and joins 12 other Graduate Student Travel Scholarships awarded by the MPSA to graduate student members in a doctoral program who are presenting at the annual conference. The Vincent Hutchings Diversity Travel Scholarship will provide $500 in travel funding with an awarding preference to students with diverse backgrounds.
Your support of the discipline and political science scholars makes a difference! Consider making a tax-deductible donation to help fund this scholarship or other MPSA Graduate Student Travel Scholarships.
