Camille D. Burge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Villanova University. Camille was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and raised in Alpharetta, Georgia. Prior to joining Villanova in the Fall of 2014, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Bethune-Cookman University and a Master’s and PhD in Political Science from Vanderbilt University.
Camille is a scholar of American politics with an emphasis on racial and ethnic politics and political psychology. Within these broad categories, her research revolves around three key themes: (1) Black-White relations in American politics; (2) Black affective experiences in politics; and (3) intersectionality, with emphases on race and gender, race and sexuality, and colorism. Camille’s research interests have been and continue to be profoundly influenced by her lived experiences. As a Black woman who grew up in Alpharetta, Georgia in close proximity to an active Ku Klux Klan, she writes to better understand the complexities she observed throughout her childhood and those she sees in everyday race relations. Camille is drawn to research projects that investigate how Black and White people perceive one another, interact with each other, and how these intergroup relations shape the political landscape.
In addition to politics in the Black-White paradigm, she examines the nuances surrounding Black public opinion and political decision-making. Building upon cognitive understandings of racial group consciousness in politics, she studies how collective experiences of emotions shape the policy opinions, group attitudes, and political participation of Black Americans. She also examines how intersectional identities shape how Black political candidates are portrayed in the media as well as the ways in which these overlapping identities shape evaluations of political candidates. Throughout her research, she uses a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to provide rich and detailed understandings of political phenomena.
In 2014 she received the Lucius Barker Award for the Best Paper on Race and Politics presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association for her paper titled, “The Meaning and Implications of Racial Resentment Across the Racial Divide,” which was co-authored with Cindy Kam. Her research has been published in The Journal of Politics, Research & Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Politics, Groups, and Identities.
In the Spring of 2018, Camille received Villanova’s Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. In the Spring of 2019 and 2020 she was a finalist for the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Outstanding Teaching and received the award in the Spring of 2021.
She currently serves as Treasurer for the organized section of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics for the American Political Science Association. In the Fall of 2019, Camille began a three year appointment as the Assistant Director for the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. In January of 2020, she was appointed to the 2020 Pre-Election Task Force for the American Association of Public Opinion Research. In this position, Camille is one of several academics working alongside survey administrators at Gallup, Pew, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, CNN, Huffington Post, and many other reputable polling organizations, to analyze local, state, and national elections data.
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