Katherine Sawyer
Department of Political Science
Assistant Professor
Dr. Katherine Sawyer recently received her PhD in Government and Politics from the
University of Maryland. Her research interests include civil conflict and rebellion,
biopsychological predictors of political violence, and spatial/computational models
of conflict. Professor Sawyer’s dissertation investigates the interplay between genetic
and environmental effects on political behavior in the Basque country of Spain, and
she plans to conduct field work in the US on individual and network responses to police
violence, as well as experiments designed to assess the conditions under which aggressive
responses are triggered by exposure to repressive environments.