Rosalee A. Clawson is Professor of Political Science and Interim Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1996, her M.A. from Ohio State in 1993, and her B.A. from DePauw University in 1990. Clawson began teaching at Purdue in 1996.
Her research focuses on American politics, especially public opinion, mass media, and the politics of race, class, and gender. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Political Communication, Journal of Black Studies, Judicature,Social Science Quarterly, and Journal of Social and Water Conservation. She is the co-author of Legacy and Legitimacy: Black Americans and the Supreme Court, Public Opinion: Democratic Ideals, Democratic Practice, and Conducting Empirical Analysis: Public Opinion in Action. She is a founding co-editor of Politics, Groups, and Identities, a journal of the Western Political Science Association, and she is President of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, the USDA, and the Spencer Foundation.
Clawson is an award-winning teacher, receiving Purdue University's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in memory of Charles B. Murply in 2002. She was inducted into the Teaching Academy in 2002 and the Book of Great Teachers in 2008. In 2013 she won the College of Liberal Arts Kenneth T. Kofmehl Undergraduate Teaching Award. She was an IMPACT faculty fellow in 2012-13 and served as a faculty consultant for the Center for Instructional Excellence between 2009 and 2012.
In 2011-12, Clawson was a fellow in the CIC Academic Leadership Program. She is a faculty affiliate of the Purdue University Center for Resarch on Diversity and Inclusion and a team leader for the Purdue University Systems Collaboratory. She served as head of the political science department between 2012 and 2016.