Jessica Kimpell Johnson is the director of research at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. She received her doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford, where she was a Harry S. Truman Scholar. 

Previously, she was on the faculty at Columbia University in the Department of Political Science for almost a decade. While at Columbia, she created and led several large lecture courses for the department and taught the year-long “Contemporary Civilization” course on social, political, and moral theory as part of Columbia’s renowned Core Curriculum. 

Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the European Political Science Review and European Journal of Political Theory. She has edited and annotated a collection of the works of Thomas Paine and recently contributed a chapter on civic ethos for the edited collection Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge). She has also written opinion essays published in various regional and national media outlets. 

Her research background is in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, specializing in democratic thought and republicanism. Prior to her doctoral studies, she received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and worked as a reporter covering the U.S. Congress for Congressional Quarterly (CQ) in Washington, D.C. As an undergraduate, she was a White House intern and received her B.A. in political science from the University of Minnesota.