J. Eric Oliver is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and host of the Knowing with Eric Oliver podcast. He has published six books, including Fat Politics: The Hidden Sources of America’s Obesity Epidemic, The Paradoxes of Segregation, and Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics. His newest book is How to Know Your Self: The Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.

Eric grew up in Houston, Texas. He got his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Chicago, he taught at Princeton University, was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale, and was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. He has written on local and suburban politics, how people’s racial environments affect their opinions, why liberals and conservatives choose different baby names, and the sources of populism and conspiracy theories in American politics. At Chicago, he teaches courses on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to the impact of myth and symbol in American politics to the politics of AI.

Eric is married to the writer and poet Thea Goodman. They have two children, Martin and Ethan, and a dog Aesop.  Good boy!