Kiara A. Hernández

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Harvard University and a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Ph.D. Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration at the Harvard Kennedy School.

I am on the 2025-2026 job market.

I study American politics with a focus on political behavior, political psychology, and the politics of inequality. My research examines the effects of large-scale social and economic transformations on everyday political life. In particular, I consider how a rapidly diversifying workforce, as well as changes to the nature of work itself and to labor market institutions, such as unions, are reshaping intergroup relations and contact in ways that are consequential for political attitudes and behavior.

My research is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Stone PhD Scholar Fellowship, the American Political Science Association Diversity Fellowship Program, and the GSAS Prize Fellowship. I am an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and a Graduate Student Researcher with The Shift Project. I was formerly the graduate student coordinator of the Working Group in Political Psychology and Behavior.

I graduated with a B.A. in International Relations and German from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, I spent two years as a predoctoral research specialist in the Emerging Scholars in Political Science program at Princeton University.

I can be reached at khernandez@g.harvard.edu.