Erica Simmons

Professor of Political Science and International Studies

110 North Hall
1050 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706

Erica Simmons is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she holds the Department of Political Science Booth Fowler Professorship. In 2023 she was awarded a Romnes Faculty Fellowship by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was also recognized by the American Political Science Association with the David Collier Mid-Career Award for her contributions to qualitative methods. Simmons holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Sociology and is the Faculty Director of the International Studies Major. Simmons received an AB from Harvard College (1999) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2012). Simmons’s work is motivated by an interest in contentious politics, particular in Latin America. She is the author of Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016) which was awarded the 2017 Charles Tilly award for distinguished contribution to scholarship on collective behavior and social movements. Simmons also writes on ethnographic and qualitative methods, co-editing (with Nicholas Rush Smith) Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-authoring articles in The American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. Her work has also appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Theory and Society, among others.