Clarissa Rile Hayward

Clarissa Rile Hayward is an American political scientist and political philosopher, currently a professor in political science at Washington University in St. Louis with affiliations in American culture studies, urban studies, and philosophy. Hayward studies the theory of political power, how political phenomena relate to theories of identity, and urban politics in the United States.

Early career and education Hayward obtained a BA in politics from Princeton University in 1988, both an MA and an MPhil from Yale University in 1994, and a PhD from Yale University in 1998. In 1999, she became a professor at the Ohio State University, before moving to Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. The book challenges this negative liberty idea of power as a state of domination by one person over another.

Hayward's second book, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces, was published in 2013. The book is partly motivated by a paradox in American racial inequality: how to reconcile the empirical reality of racial inequality with the pervasive norms against racism, and more broadly how to explain the tangible material consequences of identities if we understand identities only as cultural narratives that people associate themselves with. Hayward uses the case of residential real estate to illustrate how apparently non-political motivations for this ubiquitous behavior, such as a desire for comfort and security, have origins in stories about racial identity that American culture has historically relied on to ensure that racial categories have material consequences, through tools like neighborhood segregation and the development of exclusive suburbs. This book won the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association's best book award for 2013.

Hayward is a member of the 2020-2024 editorial leadership of the American Political Science Review, which is the most selective political science journal. She is also a past editor of Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Politics. Jacobin, and The St. Louis American, and has been quoted as an expert in venues like Time.

Selected works De-facing Power (2000) "The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City", American Political Science Review (2003) How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (2013)

Selected honours and awards 2005-2006 Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey 2014 Dennis Judd Best Book Award, for the best book published in 2013, from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2017-2018 Fellow in Residence, Harvard University