Rate My Professor Jeremy Mayer

Jeremy Mayer is a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where he directs the Master's Program in Political Science. He earned a Ph.D. in American Government from Georgetown University in 1996, with minors in International Relations and Political Theory, and a B.A. in Political Science from Brown University in 1990. Mayer has also studied politics at Oxford University, participated in advanced training at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, and studied at Brown. His academic career began as an Assistant Professor at Kalamazoo College from 1996 to 2001, where he received a campus-wide teaching award. He then served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University from 2001 to 2003 before joining George Mason University as Assistant Professor in 2003, advancing to Associate Professor in 2006. At George Mason, he teaches courses in American foreign policy, media politics and policies, national policy systems, introduction to public policy, and statistics. As a PhD advisor since 2003, he has supervised seven doctoral students to completion.

Mayer's research interests encompass American government and politics, elections, foreign policy, media politics, public opinion, racial politics, statistical methods, and U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960-2000 (Random House, 2002), 9-11: The Giant Awakens (Wadsworth, 2002; second edition 2006), and American Media Politics in Transition (McGraw-Hill, 2006), as well as coauthor of African American Statewide Candidates in the New South (Oxford University Press, 2022), The South and the Transformation of U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in Higher Education (Brookings, 2008). His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in journals such as Presidential Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Social Science Quarterly, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, covering topics like presidential image management, Christian right politics, public opinion on torture, and political socialization. Mayer received the American Political Science Association's Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching, the only national teaching award in political science, the Schar School's two-time Alumni Faculty Award, and the 2018 Don Lavoie Teaching Award. Since 2002, he has trained new U.S. diplomats at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, spoken on behalf of the State Department in Germany, Moldova, and Mexico, and provided political commentary for BBC, Fox News, PBS Newshour, NPR, and other outlets.