Faculty

Peter Enns is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests focus on public opinion, representation, and quantitative research methods. In particular, he is interested in whose policy preferences change, why, and whether government responds to these changes. This research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation and has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. He also edited the book, Who Gets Represented?

As part of his ongoing research on over time opinion and policy dynamics, Peter is currently writing a book entitled Incarceration Nation, which shows how an increasingly punitive public has been a fundamental factor in the rise of mass incarceration in the United States Peter is a faculty affiliate with Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality and a member of Cornell’s Survey Research Institute Advisory Committee. He is also former Faculty Director of Cornell’s Prison Education Program and has held fellowships at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences theme project on Judgment, Decision Making, and Social Behavior.

Peter received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007) and his undergraduate degree from Colorado College (1998). Prior to graduate school, he taught high school Spanish for three years in Baltimore, MD, through Teach For America. Additional information on his research and teaching is available on his personal website.