Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on urban politics and policy. His work investigates how politics shapes and is shaped by some of the most important policy areas that concern local governments, such as housing, transportation, policing, and economic development.
He teaches in the MPP program on politics and ethics, and also teaches an experiential field lab that partners student teams with cities and towns to work on applied urban policy problems.
His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. He has also received funding for this research from the Unite America Institute, the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), Facebook, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and the Boston Area Research Initiative. Prior to joining Harvard, he was an assistant professor at Boston University, and before that a postdoctoral researcher at the Boston Area Research Initiative. He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.A. in Government and Psychology from the College of William & Mary.
Additional information can be found on his website.
Courses
Urban Politics Field Lab
Academic Journal/Scholarly Articles
HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series
Research Papers/Reports
Sponsored projects include research, training, convening, and other initiatives externally funded through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements. Funding sources can include the US federal government, state and local agencies, private foundations, corporations, and foreign entities (public and private).
The below list includes all sponsored projects in progress or completed within the current and past 2 calendar years, administered at the Harvard Kennedy School under the direction of the named faculty member as Principal Investigator. Please note that this list includes only those activities supported by external sponsored funding; other sources of support are not included (e.g., philanthropy, HKS or Harvard internal resources).
Project Title
Sponsor Name
Award Date
Transparent Engagement
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Outside Professional Activities For Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
| Organization | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Aarhus University | Reimbursed travel |
| Hertie School | Reimbursed travel |
| National University of Singapore | Reimbursed travel |