Grant Durow

I am currently a first-year PhD student studying comparative politics with a regional focus on Western Europe and Australia. My research interests center the development of populist, challenger political parties and their influence on mainstream politics with a particular focus on party leaders. I am especially interested in how some historically extreme parties of the right and left are able to successfully rehabilitate their image and gain mainstream traction whereas others fail to do so. I am similarly interested in investigating the influence of migration and religious institutions on the development of partisan cleavages in EU countries.

I hold a BA in Government, French, and Plan II Honors from the University of Texas at Austin where I have previously done research on Australian politics as Clark Scholar at the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies. I additionally wrote my undergraduate thesis on the mainstreaming of right-wing populist political rhetoric in France and Australia which won UT's William Jennings Bryan Prize for best undergraduate thesis in Government. I spent the 2022-2023 academic year as an English teaching assistant in Lille, France, and I am the recipient of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship from the US government to study German in Berlin during summer 2024.