Elizabeth L. Thom

Welcome! I am a College Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University with a joint appointment in the Program for Environmental Policy and Culture. I am also a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research. I received my PhD in Government & Social Policy from Harvard University where I was a Malcolm Wiener Scholar in Poverty and Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School.  

I study American politics with a focus on social policy, place-based inequality, and political economy.  My book project, which won the Harvard Government Department's Charles Sumner Prize, explores how policy responses to extractive industry decline in Appalachia reshape local community contexts and political behavior. 

I am also affiliated with Harvard's Salata Institute and the Roosevelt Project at  MIT, where I have published several policy-oriented reports on community-driven, regional strategies for the energy transition. 

Prior to graduate school, I worked with E.J. Dionne, Jr. at the Brookings Institution. I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Political Science and Hispanic Studies. I earned my MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, where I was a Thouron Scholar and a member of St Cross College.  

I enjoy running, cooking, playing soccer, and rooting for my beloved Philly sports teams (go birds). 

You can find my CV  here. You can reach me at: ethom@g.harvard.edu