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HarvardX: HKS101A American Government

faculty

Thomas Patterson

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press. He is author of the book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, published in October 2013. His earlier book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation, and his book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He is also the author of Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President (1980), and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. 

project team

Zachary Davis

Zachary Davis works at HarvardX where he focuses on building open online courses in the humanities. Previously at the metaLAB (at) Harvard and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Zachary is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where he majored in International Relations and Philosophy.

Chris Engles

Chris spent over a decade in public broadcasting as a technical director for such programs as NPR’s Cartalk, PRI’s The World and NPR’s Living on Earth. In the mid 1990’s he transitioned to narrative and documentary film work - much of which has screened in New England area film festivals. When he’s not editing courses for HarvardX he’s producing a feature length documentary on modern dance, due for release in 2016. 

Kiersten Nielsen

Kiersten Nielsen is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where she majored in American studies and humanities, as well as studying graphic design. She worked for several years as an academic advisor, and is excited to now be part of the team for this course.

Shilpa Idnani

Shilpa Idnani is the Instructional Development Assistant at HarvardX. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Wellesley College, where she specialized in creating interactive computer ecosystem and hydrogeological models. Recently, she has designed, created, and collected materials for wide variety of HarvardX courses including Innovating in Healthcare, The History of the Book, and ContractsX. She will be monitoring the discussion boards for technical issues with the platform and course.

Design and graphics used throughout the course were created by Josh LaFayette and Chris Chews.