Dr. Kimberly Turner is the director of the CRSS Lab and holds the position of Assistant Professor of International Affairs at University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She returns this year to the Watson Institute at Brown University (she previously held a fellowship at Watson from 2022-2023). Dr. Turner was a International Security postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center from 2021-2023.

Dr. Turner received her PhD in political science from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her research focuses on political violence and peace science. Dr. Turner’s work sits at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations. Her substantive work examines the causes and outcomes of mass movements. Her methodological research seeks to develop new measures of political behavior efficacy.

Her dissertation analyzed the linkages between skilled labor’s employment and wage grievance to the onset and outcomes of contentious politics within authoritarian settings. Dr. Turner’s work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, American Political Science Association, Social Science Quarterly, Duck of Minerva, and the Global Post.

I am a political scientist whose research focuses on political psychology, political communication, public opinion, and measurement. My current work focuses on how emotional cues in news media have changed over time and how this change impacts the American electorate. My research also focuses on how changes in emotional states impact support for democratic norms and political violence and how we measure emotion. I am currently a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, with a focus on American Politics and Methods. Prior to Michigan I received my M.A. in Social Science at the University of Chicago.