Graduate Student Successes

We are very proud of the many accomplishments of our graduate students.  They have excelled in research and teaching and have successfully secured a range of external and internal grants.  For a recent overview of their successes, click here.

Department Awards for Graduate Students

These awards were inaugurated this year.

The Erwin Hargrove Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award is designed to recognize excellent contributions by a graduate student to teaching. It is named after Professor Emeritus Erwin Hargrove.

Erwin C. Hargrove is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and winner of the prestigious Richard E. Neustadt Award. Among his books are The Effective Presidency (Paradigm Publishers, 2010), The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature (University Press of Kansas 1999), Presidential Leadership: Personality and Political Style (Addison-Wesley 1966), The Power of the Modern Presidency (Temple University Press 1974), and Jimmy Carter as President: Leadership and the Politics of the Public Good (Louisiana State University Press 1988). Hargrove was at Vanderbilt from 1976-2000 and was director of the university's Institute for Public Policy Studies from 1976-1985. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was on the faculty of Brown University and was a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. He holds bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Yale. A dedicated undergraduate teacher, Hargrove won the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1988 and the Ernest A. Jones Faculty Advisor Award in 1990 for his work in undergraduate advising.

Recipients:
2012: Margarita Corral

The Best Graduate Student Conference Paper Award is designed to recognize excellence in research presented at a conference in the past year.

Recipients:
2012: Stephen Utych
For his paper, ''Negative Affective Language in Politics,'' presented at the MPSA Annual Conference in April 2012