Dr. Carol Swain

Dr. Carol Swain

Political scientist, James Madison Society at Princeton


Dr. Carol M. Swain is an award-winning political scientist, a former professor of political science and professor of law at Vanderbilt University, and a lifetime member of the James Madison Society, an international community of scholars affiliated with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Before joining Vanderbilt in 1999, Dr. Swain was a tenured associate professor of politics and public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. Swain is passionate about empowering others to raise their voices in the public square.

She is an author, public speaker, and political commentator. Dr. Swain is the author or editor of eight books with a ninth forthcoming in 2018. Her first book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Harvard University Press, 1993, 1995), won the Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in the U. S. on government, politics or international affairs in 1994, and was cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Johnson v. DeGrandy, 512 U.S. 997 (1994) and by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. (2003). In addition, Cambridge University Press nominated her book, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (2002), for a Pulitzer Prize.

Dr. Swain has served on the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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