Eric Oliver
Eric Oliver is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His interests include contemporary American politics, suburban and racial politics, political psychology, and the politics of science. His books include Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton University Press, 2001), Fat Politics: the Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (Oxford University Press 2005), The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multi-ethnic America (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Local Elections and the Politics of Small Scale Democracy (Princeton University Press 2012). He has also authored numerous articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review on topics ranging from absentee voting to happiness in suburbs. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University (1999-2001), a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2002-2003), and winner of a Young Investigators Career Award from the National Science Foundation. Eric is currently working on papers about public support for conspiracy theories, whether liberals and conservatives name their children differently, and conducting research on the biological foundations of political cognition.
Eric grew up in Houston, Texas. He got his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Chicago, he taught at Princeton University, was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale, and was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. He has written on local and suburban politics, how people’s racial environments affect their opinions, why liberals and conservatives choose different baby names, and the sources of populism and conspiracy theories in American politics. At Chicago, he teaches courses on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to the impact of myth and symbol in American politics to the politics of AI.