Emily Van Duyn

Emily Van Duyn is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, Van Duyn earned her PhD in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Her research explores why people talk (or do not talk) about politics and the role of digital media in facilitating a space for community and political discourse. She tackles these questions using diverse methodologies, including surveys, experiments, interviews, and ethnography. Her recent book with Oxford University Press, Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret, focuses on the reasons why individuals do not express their political opinions in public and how they express those opinions and organize in secret. Across two years, she follows a secret group of progressives in rural Texas who, out of fear of their conservative community, meet in secret to talk about politics and take political action. Her work is concerned with the effects of social, geographic, and political polarization and how these phenomena threaten liberal democratic norms.