Xanni Brown, Ph.D.

Xanni Brown studies drivers of anti-democratic attitudes and political polarization in the United States, with a specific focus on racial attitudes and reactions to increasing racial and gender diversity.

Xanni is a postdoctoral fellow in the Polarization Research Lab at Annenberg, where she focuses on drivers of anti-democratic attitudes and political polarization in the United States. Before that, she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology as part of the Social Perception and Communication Lab at Yale, where she studied reactions to the prospect of increasing racial diversity at local and national levels. Her other projects focus on the consequences of attributing discrimination to implicit (versus explicit) bias, confronting bias, and the impact of biased institutional mascots/symbols.

While at Yale, she was the head coach of Yale Women’s Rugby. Prior to graduate school, she served as policy director of the campaign finance reform nonprofit Open Democracy. She received her B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, where she studied labor-community relations in South Africa.