Brian D. Silver

A member of the MSU faculty since 1975, Professor Silver served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1987 to 1996. From 1994 to 2007 he directed the “State of the State Survey,” a quarterly survey of public opinion in Michigan (www.ippsr.msu.edu/soss). Since 2008 he has served as Director of MSU’s Center for Statistical Training and Consulting (www.cstat.msu.edu).

Honored with a Distinguished Faculty Award by MSU in 1991, Silver has also been a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University.

Before coming to MSU, Professor Silver served on the faculty of Florida State University. He earned his PhD in Political Science and a Certificate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He earned his B.A. at Reed College.

Silver has won several major grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Council for Russian and East European and Eurasian Research, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and other academic councils and private foundations.

Silver’s main current research focuses on the comparative study of political attitudes and political culture, with a particular interest in ethnic and national identification, nationalism, and support for democratic institutions.  He has published widely on these and other subjects in the leading scholarly journals in political science, public opinion, demography, and Russian and Eurasian studies.

Professor Silver’s main teaching interests are in comparative politics, research design, and mass political behavior.