Katherine Tate, professor of political science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has received the 2025 Hanes Walton Jr. Career Award from the American Political Science Association. The biennial award honors a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics and illuminates the conditions under which diversity and intergroup tolerance thrive in a democratic society.
Dr. Tate is a leading scholar on African American politics, race and gender in political science, American public opinion, government, and urban politics. In 1988 and 1996, she was a co-principal investigator on the National Black Election Survey, one of the country’s most comprehensive public opinion polls of Black American voters. Dr. Tate is the author of seven books, including her most recent publication, Gendered Pluralism (University of Michigan Press, 2023). Her next book, Black Voices in the Halls of Power: Race and Rhetorical Representation (Cambridge University Press), is set for publication later this year.
Before joining the Brown University faculty in 2013, Dr. Tate taught at the University of California, Irvine for over a decade, during which she had a stint as chair of the department of political science. Earlier, she taught in the department of political science at Ohio State University and the department of government at Harvard University.
An honors graduate of the University of Chicago, Dr. Tate earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.