Brooklyn Evann Walker
All About Me
My name is Brooklyn Walker and I will be joining the Political Science Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2025. I received my PhD from the University of Kansas in political science. My graduate training is in American politics and comparative politics.
I maintain an active research agenda on religion, public opinion, and political psychology. As I've encountered new puzzles to explore, I've added tools to my methodological toolkit. My current projects explore complementarianism and the role of threat in religious identity and worldview formation.
Image by Toni Cottrell
In addition to exploring my own inquiries, I am committed to helping students develop their own curiosity. Growing up in rural Kansas, my understanding of the world was limited. My undergraduate teachers exposed me not just to the world of politics, but also to the myriad opportunities available to postsecondary education students. If not for them, I never would have taken Arabic, lived in Egypt, or applied for the Truman Scholarship. In the classroom, I seek to connect each student to the courses I teach and open whatever doors I can for them.
When I'm not writing or teaching, you'll find me spending time with my husband, Nathan, and our three children. Three cats,, friends, and family keep life full and fun. During calmer moments, I enjoy losing myself in a good book, playing the piano, and challenging the kids to a board game.
My Academic Community
Research is rarely a solo endeavor. I'm grateful to have collaborated with the scholars below — click through to see what they're working on.
Paul Djupe, Don Haider-Markel, Abigail Vegter, Anand Sokhey, Brian Calfano, Andrew Lewis, Jacob Neiheisel, Kevin Mullinix
I'm also a regular contributor to Religion in Public, a blog written by political scientists studying the intersection of religion and public life. The blog's mission is to connect academic research to everyday conversations — translating new findings and emerging ways of thinking about religion's public presence for readers outside the academy. I write there regularly to unpack new findings from my own research in a way that's accessible to journalists, students, and the general public, often within days of a paper's publication. You can find my posts, along with work from a wider network of religion-and-politics scholars, at Religion in Public.