Emily Van Duyn

Emily Van Duyn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Van Duyn earned her PhD in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2019 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with the Program on Democracy and the Internet from 2019-2020. 

Her work is concerned with if and how people communicate about and engage with politics in contentious contexts and the implications these experiences have for the health of contemporary democracy. She tackles these questions using diverse methodologies, including surveys, experiments, interviews, and ethnography. Her work has been published in top-tier journals including the Journal of Communication, Political Communication, New Media and Society, Social Media and Society, Mass Communication and Society, and Social Science Computer Review. Her 2021 book Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret, (Oxford UP), follows a secret group of progressives in rural Texas who, out of fear of their conservative community and families, met in secret to talk about politics and take political action. 

Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association as well as top paper awards from the American Political Science Association and the International and National Communication Associations. Her forthcoming book, Hearts Divided: How Politics Shape Our Closest Connections (Oxford UP), explores the experience of political difference in romantic relationships and their broader implications for liberal democracy in the United States.