Katherine Rader

Katherine Rader

Ph.D. Student in American Politics

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Katherine Rader is a Ph.D. candidate in political science and a Graduate Fellow in the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy for 2020-2021. She specializes in American political development, political economy, race, and labor politics. In her teaching and research, she focuses on historical struggles for equality pursued by racial advocacy organizations and labor advocates. Her dissertation asks how coalitions that formed to fight for both racial and economic justice in the early twentieth century shifted their focus away from programs for economic redistribution. Instead, they pursued a version of anti-discrimination politics that failed to challenge legislation in the 1940s-1960s that chipped away at labor and welfare programs. Prior to starting her doctoral program at Penn, she worked in health policy and nonprofit governance in Washington D.C. for five years. She earned her B.A. in Politics & Government from the University of Puget Sound.