Gillion Wins W.E.B. Du Bois Book Award

Daniel Gillion, Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science, has received the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) for his book, Governing with Words: The Political Dialogue on Race, Public Policy, and Inequality in America. He is an affiliate faculty member with the Department for Africana Studies and part of the ninth cohort of Penn Fellows.

Governing with Words demonstrates that the political dialogue on race offered by presidents and congressional members alters the public policy process and shapes societal and cultural norms to improve the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, illustrating that words are a powerful tool for combating racial inequality in America. His first book, The Political Power of Protest: Minority Activism and Shifts in Public Policy, demonstrates the influential role of protest to garner a response from each branch of the federal government and was the winner of the 2014 Best Book Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. In addition to his books, Gillion’s work has been published in the academic journals Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, as well as in the edited volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior.

Gillion completed his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and was the Ford Foundation Fellow and the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University, as well as the CSDP Research Scholar at Princeton. He joined Penn in 2009.

NCOBPS was founded in 1969 and promotes research in and critical analysis of topics usually marginalized in political science scholarship. The W.E.B. Du Bois Book Award recognizes outstanding scholarly books that grapple with intersections of race and political power.