Your February 2026 reads

Alumni

2/20/2026

This month’s featured titles by A&S alumni and faculty include a look at the urban-rural divide, a biography of an anti-poverty activist, and a business guide for "winning dream jobs, awards, and elite opportunities.”

Rural Versus Urban

Suzanne Mettler, PhD ’94 & Trevor Brown, PhD ’25

“Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’?” says the book’s publisher, Princeton University Press.

As the press describes, its authors “argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division.”

Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions; Brown is a postdoc at Johns Hopkins who’ll join the University of Oregon faculty in fall 2026. In their book—subtitled The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy—they explore the dangers of political polarization.

Joyful Revolution

Diana Skelton ’86

“At the age of 20, Mary Rabagliati quit a secretarial job in London to move to an emergency housing camp in France without running water or any sanitation facilities,” writes the publisher, an independent press based in the U.K.

“It was 1962 when, amongst that bleak squalor and deprivation, she began a lifelong commitment to anti-poverty work and fighting for the human rights of people on the margins of society, working towards a vision that no one should have to live a life trapped by poverty.”

Skelton—herself an antipoverty activist who has worked for the U.N.—offers a biography of Rabagliati, whom she knew personally and professionally. A double major in history and in Russian and Soviet studies on the Hill, Skelton is an editor of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.

Pitch Your Potential

Vicki Johnson ’01

This business guide offers (per the subtitle) a “formula for winning dream jobs, awards, and elite opportunities.”

It’s penned by Johnson, a former government major in Arts & Sciences who founded ProFellow, a curated database of fellowships, grad schools, and awards.

Topics include forming a winning mindset, becoming memorable to a selection committee, having timely goals, crafting a mutually beneficial pitch, and effectively using detail.