Claire Leavitt

I am an assistant professor of government at Smith College in Northampton, MA. I received my PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2021.

My research interests include legislative institutions; Congressional oversight and investigations; partisan polarization and gridlock in federal and state legislatures; political networks (among legislators, legislative staff and interest groups); federalism; and the role of gender in legislative behavior. I’m also interested in the influence of congressional and federal agency staff on member/executive preferences. I spent the 2019 calendar year in Washington, D.C. working for the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform as the Project on Government Oversight’s (POGO) 2019 Congressional Oversight Fellow.

I am a native of Brooklyn, NY and received a B.A. in History from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI and an M.A. in Political Science from Boston University in Boston, MA. I love reading and writing fiction, animals of all kinds (including and especially my dog, Winston), and musical theater.