BC's Kristin Lunz Trujillo awarded a 2026 Carnegie Fellowship

Assistant Professor of Political Science Kristin Lunz Trujillo, whose research and teaching encompasses such subjects as political behavior, political psychology, and urban-rural division, has been named a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

The Carnegie Fellows Program supports “high-caliber scholarship and research in the social sciences and humanities that address important and enduring issues confronting our society.” Fellows were chosen based on the originality and potential impact of their proposals as well as the capacity to communicate the findings to a broad audience. Lunz Trujillo enters the program as it continues building a body of research focused on political polarization, having committed up to $18 million to this effort over a three-year period.

“I’m deeply honored to have been chosen for this award,” said Lunz Trujillo, who joined the Boston College faculty last year after having taught at the University of South Carolina since 2023. “My research looks at how and why rural areas are politically distinct from other places, and personally it means a lot to me—as someone who grew up in rural Minnesota—that the research community is interested in this. Understanding how place impacts politics is something I think many people didn’t really recognize or have much interest in until fairly recently, even though it’s something my family always recognized and talked about growing up.

“This award will help me continue this line of work, and I plan to start researching how urban-rural animosity can be reduced while also respecting how people from different places might think and act differently. It also means a lot that I’m able to represent Boston College as an institution. I’m extremely grateful for the support I’ve had here at BC.”

Lunz Trujillo describes the current American political climate as one of increased affective polarization, where the two political sides increasingly dislike or even hate each other. Although polarization and division are not inherently bad for society—“differences in opinion are a fact of life and democracies actually can thrive in situations with very different perspectives and interests”—the situation becomes problematic if one side sees the other as “an enemy too far gone for us to understand or compromise with, even if that’s not actually true.” The risk of violence and gridlock, among other ills, can increase.

Such division is hardly unprecedented in the United States, she said, but the contemporary polarization has some unique features.

“We live in a high-choice, always-available media environment that allows us to select echo chambers that reinforce our existing views, while algorithms further encourage this. The constant information stream also means that there’s fierce competition for our engagement, so shocking or anger-inducing content often gets the most attention, and the result is that people stop seeing complexity or looking for details and nuance.

“Further, the online environment removes face-to-face interactions, which essentializes people and their perspectives into anonymous blurbs of information. Political leadership worsens and exploits this divisiveness caused by our media environment.”

Lunz Trujillo also cites smaller institutional changes, notably the homogenization of the two parties across the country, thus limiting flexibility and adaptability to local variations and concerns, thereby contributing to partisan stereotyping and polarization. It also hinders representation, which can cause general frustration and disillusionment with government.

“But I think there are opportunities for us to dampen this animosity. I’ll have the chance to explore this more, particularly looking at political division along geographic lines, thanks to the fellowship.”

Lunz Trujillo also has a large body of work on health attitudes and behaviors such as those relating to vaccines, misinformation, and trust, that has won several awards and has been sponsored by a National Science Foundation grant.

Her research has been published in academic outlets such as Nature Human Behavior, Scientific Data, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Geography, and JAMA Network Open. Her work has been featured in numerous news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and “John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight,” among others, and has also been used in official guidelines for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.