Bart Bonikowski was associate professor of sociology at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University until 2020. Relying on surveys, textual analysis, and experimental methods, his research applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on nationalism and populism. His research has shown that popular conceptions of the nation are fragmented within countries but consistent across them, that the nation and the state evoke distinct cognitive constructs with differential affective loadings, and that national identification fluctuates in patterned ways within national communities. In studying populism, he has sought to analytically separate populist claims-making from political ideology, demonstrating that populism is a dynamic but highly patterned feature of political discourse on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, the Annual Review of Sociology, the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and a number of edited volumes.
