Melissa Deckman

Melissa Deckman is the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs and Chair of the Political Science Department at Washington College.

She is also an Affiliated Scholar with the Public Religion Research Institute, where she writes regularly about religion, gender, and politics at its Faith in the Numbers blog.

Professor Deckman’s areas of specialty include religion and politics, state and local politics, and women and politics. Her forthcoming book, Mama Grizzlies: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Tea Party in America, is under contract with NYU Press. Her most recent work examines the impact of “the “War on Women” on the 2012 presidential election (co-authored with John McTague) and was just published in American Politics Research .

In addition to more than a dozen scholarly articles, she is the author of School Board Battles: the Christian Right in Local Politics (Georgetown University Press 2004), which examines the impact of the Christian Right on school board elections, and which won the 2007 Hubert Morken Award, given by the American Political Science Association biennially to the best work on religion and politics. Along with Laura Olson and Sue Crawford, she is the co-author of Women with a Mission: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Women Clergy (University of Alabama Press 2005). She is also co-author of the textbook Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence with Julie Dolan and Michele Swers, now in its second edition with Pearson/Prentice Hall. She is also the editor, along with WAC’s Joseph Prud’homme, of Curriculum and the Culture War: When and Where is the Bible Appropriate in Public Schools? (Peter Lang Press, 2014).

She appears frequently as a guest for a variety of public affairs programs on public radio and television to discuss Maryland politics and she has been cited in numerous newspaper articles, including in the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, Pundifact and the Christian Science Monitor.