Wendy Rahn is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Before joining the Minnesota faculty, she held faculty positions at The Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and Duke University. She served on the Board of Overseers for the National Election Studies and as co-editor of Political Psychology, the official journal for the International Society of Political Psychology from 1996 to 2004. The Society also named her as the 1999 recipient of the Erik Erikson Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Political Psychology. Also in 1999, she received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Organized Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior from the American Political Science Association.
Her research interests include the role of emotions in political thinking and behavior, citizen participation in politics, and the role of social capital. Her new projects involve questions about the role of early life circumstances in the health of late life women, the social and economic legacies of World World 1, the the historical and contemporary politics of alternative and complementary medicine.