Emily Van Duyn

Emily Van Duyn is an associate 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 several 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. Her current book project explores the effects of political polarization on romantic and familial relationships and their broader implications for liberal democracy in the United States.

Her work has been published in top-tier journals including the Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Information Communication and Society, Mass Communication and Society, and Social Science Computer Review. Her work has  also been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and has received several awards, including the 2023 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association and an honorable mention from the American Political Science Association as well as top paper awards from the International and National Communication Associations.