Shayla Olson

Biography

Shayla Olson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Rooney Democracy Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Her research spans the fields of American political behavior and political communication, with a focus on racial and ethnic politics and religion and politics in the United States. She uses a variety of quantitative methods, including survey experiments and computational text analysis, to examine how religious and racial identities intersect to shape political attitudes and behavior. Her current work argues that religion functions as a social identity — not merely a set of beliefs or practices — and that this religious group attachment is formed through a process of racial socialization that imbues white Christians' sense of what it means to be Christian with racial meaning, shaping their attitudes toward racial inequality and race-conscious policies. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as [*Politics & Religion*] and the [*Review of Religious Research*], and has been supported by numerous grants, including the Rapoport Family Foundation Dissertation Research Grant. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan.