GUEST SUBMISSION: PSL hosting annual Doc Farber speaker

The Political Science League is hosting the third annual W.O. “Doc” Farber Forum Speaker Series on Wednesday, March 28. This year, PSL is proud to announce John R. Hibbing as the speaker selection. Hibbing is currently the Foundation Regents Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

For nearly 20 years, he studied Congress, congressional careers, congressional elections, comparative legislatures and public opinion toward Congress. Then, about a decade ago, he, John Alford (Rice University), and Kevin Smith (UNL) began investigating the role of biological factors in explaining political variation, at the time an uncommon approach for the discipline of political science.

He previously edited the Legislative Studies Quarterly, served as Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Legislative Studies Section, co-authored Congress as Public Enemy and Stealth Democracy (with Elizabeth Theiss- Morse), received the Fenno Prize and was a NATO Fellow in Science, a Senior Fulbright Fellow, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind and a Velux Senior Resarch Fellow at Sydansk University in Denmark. He was recently elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Hibbing’s speech, “Predisposed: Why Liberals and Conservatives are So Different,” ingeniously brings together two seemingly separate studies, biology and politics, and shows their relation to each other. He presents the disparities between parties in an interesting and innovative manner.

The Political Science League created the Farber Forum Speaker Series in memory of past Political Science professor and department chair, W.O. “Doc” Farber. Doc Farber was an advocate of education in and out of the classroom and the series emulates his love for politics. Previous speakers in this series were Theda Skocpol of Harvard University and John Aldrich of Duke University.

-Teresa A. Johnson,

PSL President

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