Emily Kurtz

head and shoulders photograph of Emily Kurtz
PhD Candidate
Political Science
MPC Primary Research Areas
Research Interests

1) American Political Economy

2) Statistics and Computing

3) Political Geography

4) STEM Pedagogy

Biography

Emily is a fourth year PhD candidate in Political Science in the subfields of American Politics and Methodology. She also holds a Master's degree in Statistics from the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the role that work historically done in a community plays on that community's identity and views on future economic and environmental policy. She joined the MPC as a Population Studies Predoctoral Trainee in 2021.

Emily became interested in learning about politics and geography from her childhood spent in small-town Ohio, about a half hour west of Cleveland. Her ongoing projects include a paper categorizing counties based on the deindustrialization they have experienced over the past several decades, a paper studying when people give companies a "pass" to harm their direct environment (through the lens of PFAS - a timely issue in the Twin Cities), and a paper studying the differences in how Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds "think about" moral political issues. She also hopes to revisit an old project - one studying the impact of weight-based examples on gender differences in math learning outcomes - as one of her main goals in life is to help others, especially those of backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in STEM, defeat their math anxiety.