Research in the Department of Political Science is organized around four subfields – American Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Theory, and International Relations. The Department also pursues, hosts and collaborates with a series of research initiatives. Additionally, Political Science faculty are affiliated with a number of research centers and programs at Johns Hopkins University

Subfields

• American Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Political Theory
• International Relations

Research Initiatives

Racial Politics Research Theme

The discipline of political science has, from its very beginning, been deeply entangled with issues of race and racism. From its origins in the race science and eugenics milieu of the late nineteenth century (largely at Johns Hopkins), political science has evolved into a field of study that often systematically excludes and distorts serious consideration of race and racism as critical and constitutive elements of politics.

The Department’s Racial Politics research theme explores how political science and its subfields treat race as an object of study and as an important axis of political thought, institutions, and behavior; how race has been “written out” of political science; and how we might rethink political science in order to grapple with both the discipline’s own history and the challenges of racial politics in the contemporary world.

Associated Research Initiatives

• American Prison Writing Archive
• Net-Zero Industrial Policy Lab
• Rethinking the Right to the City through the Black Radical Tradition

Workshops & Seminar Series

The Political Science Department Seminar Series

Faculty and graduate students convene weekly to build intellectual community with external speakers, faculty debates, and graduate focused topics (including practice job talks). The full program for the Fall 2023 Department Seminar Series can be found in events.

The 2023-2024 Political Theory Workshop

The 2023-2024 Political Theory Workshop brings together four core theory events featuring Hopkins’ graduate students and faculty and combines them with external theory guests speaking at the Political Science Department Symposium, the Seminar on Political and Moral Thought, and other occasional series.  

Across these events, political theory faculty and graduate students and a broader inter-subfield/inter-disciplinary group engage collegially with cutting-edge research and sustain critical conversations that enrich the subfield’s communal and intellectual life.