Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Trellace Lawrimore is a political scientist specializing in historical political economy and Southern politics. The central question of her research is how elites maintain power over racially diverse populations. She uses historical data and formal theory to answer this question. Her book project tackles this question in the antebellum US South; she investigates how Southern enslavers leveraged private and public resources to repress enslaved Americans. As a native North Carolinian, Trellace has long been interested in the history of racism in her home state, and so she has also studied the predicates of Ku Klux Klan activity in 20th-century North Carolina. In her newest research agenda, Trellace examines the politics of enfranchisement, particularly the reputational consequences to parties that oppose voting rights.