The APSA Distinguished Teaching Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor outstanding contributions to the undergraduate and graduate teaching of political science at two- and four-year institutions.
Brielle Harbin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy, where she teaches courses on American constitutional development, media and politics, and race, gender, class, and sexuality in U.S. politics. In her research, Harbin examines the emergence of narratives related to social issues stemming from media exposure, social identities, and personal experience. Harbin investigates how these understandings emerge in the general public as well as how these same dynamics manifest and affect teaching and learning in the university classroom.
Prior to joining the USNA faculty, Harbin was a Vice Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She still serves as a fellow with the Penn Program on Public Opinion Research and Election Studies. Harbin received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University, and a B.A. in Government from Smith College.
Citation from the Award Committee:
In the span of under a decade, Dr. M. Brielle Harbin has established an impressive track record in promoting equity and inclusion both within and well beyond her own classroom. Dr. Harbin’s leadership in this arena began when she was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. During that time, she co-organized learning communities on teaching, power, and difference and gender identity/expression; created a workshop series for women graduate students to reflect on how gender shapes their experience in academe; and established professionalization workshops for Black graduate students. Dr. Harbin has continued this important work as a faculty member at the United States Naval Academy, where she has been an Assistant Professor since 2019. Her own courses have featured both curricular and pedagogical innovation, as she introduced a new course on race, gender, class, and sexuality in US politics to the Naval Academy’s political science offerings. She also developed new instructional approaches and techniques to encourage students’ engagement with diversity and inclusion issues and foster a sense of belonging and community in her classes. Beyond her own courses, Dr. Harbin led a workshop on inclusive remote teaching for Naval Academy faculty learning during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since facilitated anti-racist pedagogy workshops at several other colleges and universities.
The impact of these initiatives is far-reaching. The curriculum Dr. Harbin developed for the women graduate students workshop series some eight years ago lives on in the Women in the Academy speaker series at Vanderbilt’s Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center. The learning communities she organized have resulted in a published teaching guide, “Teaching Beyond the Gender Binary in the University Classroom,” and two coauthored journal articles, including the award-winning “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the ISSOTL journal, Teaching & Learning Inquiry. And Dr. Harbin’s own classroom interventions have yielded solo-authored publications in College Teaching and PS: Political Science & Politics. Though still early career, Dr. Harbin has distinguished herself as a diversity, equity, and inclusion leader in political science and higher education more broadly. For this reason, the committee is pleased to select her as the 2023 recipient of the APSA Distinguished Teaching Award.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Shamira M. Gelbman (chair) of Wabash College, Dr. Judithanne Scourfield McLauchlan of the University of South Florida, and Dr. Everett Albert Vieira, III of California State University, Fresno.
