Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Angie Maxwell
PolySci Superstar
This story is really personal, but I’ll share it because it’s really true,” starts Angie Maxwell, director of the University of Arkansas’ Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society.
The story she’s telling is about finishing her last book, 2019’s “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics” — written in collaboration with Todd Shields, dean of the UA’s J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences — while simultaneously running the Blair Center, teaching classes and raising her 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, with her husband, UA professor Sidney Burris.
“I was exhausted. Really exhausted. I told myself that I was going to finish the book by her birthday, because I was in a place at the end [of the writing process] where I was saying ‘No’ all the time. What she didn’t know was that she was also going to be getting a puppy for her birthday; she is a dog person. I am not, she is, and she had begged and cried. I’m allergic. But my guilt was so bad those last six months, I said, ‘I’m going to get her a puppy, because then she’ll know how much she means to me,’ because I was wrecked with the constant guilt, yet needing to finish.
“When I told her I had finished, when I printed it out, she was not impressed,” Maxwell continues, in a voice that carries a pleasing Southern accent collected from three different states — Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. She peppers her conversation with tart, witty asides that she doesn’t pause to laugh at herself — there’s very little pausing involved with Maxwell’s lively conversation — but which highly entertain her listener. “That ‘switching of hats’ is so dramatic — I’m sitting here, ‘I finished my book!’ and my kid is saying, ‘I mean, are we going to play ‘Clue’?”
The book hit with a splash, and garnered glowing reviews, most of which noted its authors’ prescience at examining a subject area that would resonate so loudly with today’s political climate. But Maxwell’s star in the field of political science has actually been rising for a decade. Her first book, 2014’s “The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority and the Politics of Whiteness,” won the V.O. Key Book Award, given by the Southern Political Science Association, and received an honorable mention from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s Holman Award. Her articles have been published by outlets like The Washington Post, Five Thirty Eight, Vox and the Huffington Post, and she’s frequently quoted when other writers cover Southern politics. She’s appeared as a guest on nearly a dozen podcasts. The work she and the Blair Center have done is groundbreaking, including the Blair Center Poll, administered in 2010, 2012 and 2016, which is producing results unlike any other in the country by including an oversample of Southern, Black and Latinx respondents and examining political behavior and attitudes. And last year, Maxwell was invited to participate in the four-hour PBS project “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., something she describes as a “real honor” and a vital project for the times we’re in.
“I don’t know how she does what she does,” marvels Burris, who says his wife gets by on very little sleep. “The book that she just published happened to come out at the right time, and so she gets phone calls, she gets texts, she has to do podcasts, interviews — and this is just going to get worse as election day approaches. It’s almost impossible to sit down and plan a day. I don’t know how she can fit it in, but she always does. She won’t say ‘No,’ and the reason she doesn’t is that she thinks it’s part of her service to the community.”
“She is at the very top of her field — as expert as it gets — but remains, at her core, a teacher,” says Arkansas State Rep. Nicole Clowney. “Whether they have questions about the history of American politics or the class
“She worked her way to where she is now with nothing but her raw talent and pure grit. She is titanium, yet remains one of the most sensitive people I know. She is at the very top of her field — as expert as it gets — but remains, at her core, a teacher.” — Arkansas State Rep. Nicole Clowney
Halloween party, she’s the one everyone calls, and she has seemingly boundless generosity to answer the phone, every time.”
SO MANY HATS
However, on a recent August afternoon, as she speaks with a local reporter, telling the story about her daughter, her daughter’s dog and her finished manuscript, Maxwell is not the political science superstar that she is during her workday. Instead, she’s something that most of us will easily recognize: a working mom during a pandemic, sharing her home office with a husband and daughter, searching for a quiet place where she can have an in-depth conversation without being interrupted. Her solution? She’s talking on her Bluetooth device in her car. The plan works perfectly until a strong summer thunderstorm chases her back to her front porch to finish the conversation.
The “switching of hats” has gotten more complicated during the pandemic, when working from home means the lines between careers and personal lives have been blurred. Consider this second story Maxwell tells about the intersection of her daughter and her work: Maxwell recently sat down and put a lot of thought and effort into a 28-part tweet about “Mrs. America,” the Netflix series that details the rise and influence of the right’s Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s. Maxwell knows a little something about the subject — Schlafly figures prominently in her latest book, and she fact-checked historian Marjorie Spruill’s book “Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics.” Carefully sourced and chock full of dates, statistics and facts, the thread took some time for Maxwell to put together, and she felt a sense of satisfaction as she hit the button to publish.
Almost as an afterthought — she says she almost never tweets about her daughter — she composed a tweet about the precocious Elizabeth: “Found the kid playing with her dog instead of Zooming with her teacher. She told me not to worry. She took a screen shot of herself ‘paying attention,’ and then cut her video and replaced it with the picture. ‘It’s a gallery view of 20 kids, Mom. They can’t tell.’”
When her phone started going crazy with Twitter notifications, Maxwell eagerly checked it, happy that her Schlafly thread was getting some responses. But when she checked, she quickly realized it was the tweet about her daughter that was getting the attention.
“It went completely viral — Buzzfeed News wanted to interview her. I was like, ‘No, she’s 9 and would love to be a celebrity, but that’s not happening,” Maxwell says. Ultimately, the tweet would get over 260,000 likes and was re-tweeted nearly 40,000 times. It ended up on Facebook and Instagram, too. “One of the groups that posted it was Feminist News. Not the ‘Mrs. America’ thread — no, scamming the Zoom feed and playing with the dog. Probably the biggest tweet I’ll do in my life: the kid and the dog.
“It’s a good story about moms handling the different hats all the time,” she muses. “More and more women are climbing the ladder in different industries and different areas. It’s about switching the hats, figuring out the balance and trying to help those that come after you.”
“I’ve seen her be such a mentor to other young women — she’s engaged them, she’s warm, she opens herself up,” says Stephanie Streett, executive director of the Clinton Foundation. ”Women on campus, women running for office. That’s really important. Diane Blair was one of the most important influences on my life as a mentor at the UA, and even later when I was in the White House. When I watch Angie emulating those same qualities, I know there are going to be a lot of women who have come through the University that she has mentored that are going to do great things in our country. It’s important for women who have this influence, knowledge and power to pass that on to others, and that’s something that I really admire in Angie.”
Maxwell is more than familiar with the struggles of American women through the ages: She has spent a good deal of time studying and writing about the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the rocky road to ratifying (or not) the Equal Rights Amendment.
“Her work on modern sexism, in particular, and its impact on the 2016 Presidential election opened my eyes to how widely held the view is that ambitious women just aren’t to be trusted,” says Clowney. “We’ve seen this pop up in our news cycles again and again and, thanks to Angie’s scholarship, I, and so many other women, can now articulate this thing that we have felt, personally, throughout our lives, and we have the data to back up that it is real. Armed with that, now we can all actively work to make it better. That’s thanks to Angie.”
So, Maxwell says, when she was invited last year by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History to interview Hillary Clinton about her time as first lady of Arkansas, she wanted to be sure to ask Clinton questions about how she handled juggling motherhood with a high-power law career, all while serving Arkansas as one of the most policy-involved first ladies in state history.
“We don’t have a lot of history about women who are in leadership roles. We don’t have enough about what their lived experience is like during that period of time,” says Maxwell. “I think about that all the time with Diane Blair, as well — the age she was in, having young children and being in a male-dominated field. They’re a remarkable generation to me. There are a million things I want to know about that generation of women because we would not be where we are without them.”
“I had the privilege of sitting in when she had the opportunity to interview Secretary Clinton,” notes Streett. “The rapport that the two of them had — you would have thought they had known each other for years. Two brilliant women, at the top of their game, interacting, and talking and having this wonderful conversation. It was one of the highlights of my life.”
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH
There’s ample proof that Maxwell ran with the advances made by the previous generation of women — her ethos has been built on hard work from adolescence on. The middle child of three daughters born to a Louisiana family with a public school-teaching mother, Maxwell says that education was emphasized from an early age. When she hit high school, Maxwell set her sights on earning a scholarship to pay for college, so she was a hard-working student — and talented standardized test taker — at her highly competitive, allgirls school in Baton Rouge. When she received a brochure from the University of Arkansas with a gorgeous photo of the Ozarks on the cover, she was intrigued. On her application, she indicated an interest in a major in International Relations — but when asked if she had an idea of what she would do with such a major, she says, laughing, “I’d love to tell you. I think I just felt like I wanted to know more about the world.” Her stellar transcript attracted the UA, and she was offered a Middle East Studies Fellowship, which would require taking a minor in the subject.
“It was a full scholarship,” she says. “I felt very lucky. I felt like, ‘Wow — all the work was worth it.’”
Maxwell wasted no time in packing her four years in Fayetteville full of educational successes. As a sophomore, she studied in Morocco for a semester, becoming fluent in the Arabic she had studied for five classes a week since her freshman year. As a junior, she was awarded a Truman Scholarship, a coveted and highly selective award given to high-achieving students headed for public service. Senior year, her thesis, a study of J. William Fulbright’s Middle East peace plan, was published in the UA’s first undergraduate research journal in November 2000 — making her one of only 12 students chosen for the honor. Writing that thesis, she says, is what helped her narrow her focus to Southern politics. She tracked down and interviewed storied Fulbright advisers like Seth Tillman and Lee Williams, but it was when she spent hours in the stacks reading correspondence from Arkansans around the state writing to Fulbright that she felt the stirrings of inspiration that would lead her to her current path.
“It was so eye-opening to me about Southern culture, the way things were understood and the emotional reaction that some people would have to how they saw themselves positioned to the rest of the world. The subject matter really fascinated me in how that dynamic worked: the South within the nation and within the world.”
Her senior year was not without some major stress, however: during that school year, the subject of how many Razorback home games would be played in Fayetteville and how many would be played in Little Rock was receiving contentious debate in all corners of the state. Maxwell was president of the Associated Student Government, and when that governing body invited the UA Trustees to come and address the students about the subject, Maxwell ended up front and center, assigned the duty of giving a speech at the end of the assembly. She had to practice in front of then-UA athletic director Frank Broyles. Her student government emails were made public as result of a Freedom of Information Act request, and she says she spent so much time in the UA general counsel’s office blacking out redacted information, she received Christmas cards from him for years afterwards.
“And I got a lot of really awful hate mail,” she adds, much of it rife with gender-based insults. But she shrugs off the ugly memories, saying her biggest regret was that the events overshadowed the ASG founding of Safe Ride, a program that offered students safe ways of returning home after a night out. It’s one of the things she’s most proud of during her time in student government.
“It really did drop the DWI rate,” says Maxwell. “It was pretty significant — I think around 40%.”
She traded the heat of a tough semester for the heat of Texas when she headed to Austin that fall, where she had accepted a position in the American Studies graduate program at the University of Texas. Her professors included noted political scientists Walter Dean Burnham and Elspeth Rostow.
“It’s a small program, and the other students were from what to me were very fancy schools,” she says. “Being judged solely by the merit of my work and my ideas — it was a very peaceful and wonderful place for me. …I had incredible, incredible teachers — I studied under two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians.
“It changed my life,” she says.
PERFECT FIT AT UA
With her freshly minted Ph.D., Maxwell accepted a visiting professor position at the UA in 2008. She had always loved Fayetteville, but there was another reason to return: She and Burris had started dating during a break in Maxwell’s UT studies when she returned to work for the UA Press for a little over a year. The relationship persevered through the challenges of long distance, and by now the two were married and looking for positions around the country that would allow them to teach at the same institution. As if by some miracle, the position of Endowed Chair at the Blair Center came open, a position that required an interdisciplinary background with an emphasis in southern politics and seemed to be tailor-made for Maxwell’s qualifications. She was 38 weeks pregnant when she interviewed for the position; her daughter was a week old when the offer came through.
“She has been widely acclaimed as probably understanding the voters in the South better than anybody,” notes Jim Blair, widower of Diane Blair, for whom the Center is named.
Maxwell was only in her mid-30s when she accepted the position as the Blair Endowed Chair, and she was barely 40 when she assumed the director position. By that time, she had studied, published and worked in a male-dominated field for nearly two decades and had learned to trust her instincts. But it wasn’t always easy. One lesson came when she worked on her dissertation at UT, a study on the influence of poet James Agee on writer James Dickey. Her bulldog research tactics revealed previously unpublished material, including an unpublished elegy Dickey wrote on the day Agee died. (The find was so significant, her paper was published in Southern Quarterly in 2004.) When Dickey’s son tweeted about her current book, she contacted him and told him about the paper she had written about her father years before.
“He wrote me back and said that Agee was the writer his father read the most to them as children,” says Maxwell. “It was a very full circle moment for me. If I could go back now and tell myself something that would help me, it would be to trust my instincts. I just always assumed that if I had some gut reaction to something, or some instinct, then everybody else must already know this, right? Because what do I know? It took me a long time to realize that my life experiences as a Southern female, particularly in political science, a very male-dominated discipline, that sometimes those instincts are leading somewhere that hasn’t been written about, and I can hear them because of my life experiences and the perspective I have come from.”
Her willingness to veer from the “but this is the way things have always been done” thinking has also been a positive in her line of work.
“In a weird way, I think being kind of naive about graduate school, and maybe doubting my own contribution or my own instinct, made me dig even deeper into work,” she notes.
“It also kept me from falling prey to the disciplinary rules,” she adds, prompting her to suggest polling questions that “turn out to be really productive and fruitful, and you’re like, ‘Holy cow, that’s not how political scientists have measured sexism,’ but my thought is, ‘I think this will work better.’”
“Diane [Blair] brought a very unique perspective to looking at American politics, with an eye toward how the South is driving things, and she did it from a very interdisciplinary perspective,” says Shields. “In academia today, it’s increasingly rewarding for individuals to specialize, and to become so specialized that they are maybe one of 10 people talking about a particular topic. That wasn’t Diane’s legacy at all. …
“Angie has always been very interdisciplinary, a very broad thinker. This is a person who regularly reads in six to seven different disciplines, and yet she is also a sophisticated quantitative/ statistical analyst and she can even code statistical software like a champ. We just don’t see that type of combination – breadth of knowledge across so many different disciplines, combined with expertise in historical, qualitative, and quantitative research abilities. She fit, exactly, the type of perspective and ap-proach that Diane brought, not only to teaching, but to researching American poli-tics and Southern politics in particular.”
Shields says Maxwell remains as dedicated to teaching as she is to researching and publishing.
“She’s one of the rare people who is not only a fantastic researcher, but she’s a great, amazing teacher,” Shields says. “She just regularly gets perfect scores in her courses, and she’s a hard teacher. You don’t take a class from her and think you’re going to slide. She’ll tell me what she expects of her students and I’ll think, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re going to hate you,’ and then at the end of the course her students will write, ‘You changed my life.’ ‘You set me on a different course.’ ‘You challenged me in a way no one else has.’ All the same things that people say about Diane [Blair]. She’s a special, unique individual.”
As her star has risen, so have pleas to run for office. As far as “public-facing politics” is concerned, though, she says she’s where she needs to be — and where she can make the biggest contribution.
“I honestly think that it takes all of us,” she says. “There’s someone out there advocating as an activist. And it’s important that there’s someone doing the deep dive research so that we know what the landscape looks like, where the real issues are and how people really feel beyond just insult politics.”
“She’s already done great things, but I expect even greater things from her, and I’m hoping we can keep her,” says Blair. “I know at some point there will be major efforts to hire her away and offers that are hard to refuse. I view that with some anxiety. I would like to keep her there at the Blair Center for as long as I can.
“I hope, someday, she’ll have a Center of her own named after her.”