Thomas Craemer

Associate Professor

School of Public Policy

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Education

Ph.D., Political Science, Stony Brook University, 2005
M.A., Political Science, Stony Brook University, 2002
Doctorate, University of Tuebingen, Germany, Political Science, 2001
M.A., University of Tuebingen, Germany, Political Science, Computer Science, 1997

Teaching & Research Interests

Race relations
Public opinion and survey research
Race related policies
Slavery reparations
Diversity and inclusion

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Dr. Thomas Craemer

TRADITIONAL AND NEW SURVEYING TECHNIQUES TO EXPLORE RACE RELATED ISSUES

Professor Thomas Craemer has used both traditional as well as new methods in survey research to investigate the psychology of race. His interest in racial attitudes was shaped by the experience of growing up struggling with his native Germany’s racist history. He couldn’t understand how a democratic country could turn fascist and violently racist within the span of a few years.

After moving from Germany to the United States, he began using reaction time measures to tap people’s implicit racial attitudes and published a number of papers based on that research. His paper on “Implicit Closeness to Blacks, Support for Affirmative Action, Slavery Reparations, and Vote Intentions for Barack Obama in the 2008 Elections” received the International Society of Political Psychology’s Roberta Sigel Award in 2010 and was published in 2014 in Basic and Applied Social Psychology (vol. 36, pp. 413-424). His work on implicit racial attitudes has also appeared in Political Psychology (2008, Vol. 29, Nr. 3, pp. 407-436; 2010, Vol. 31, Nr. 6, pp. 797-829), among other outlets.

Craemer incorporates the results of his research to engage students in the classroom. “I use my work as examples to illustrate how you can combine traditional and new surveying techniques,” he says. He also enjoys engaging with students outside the classroom. Between 2007 and 2012, he accompanied Department (now School) of Public Policy graduate students to do research and volunteer for Hurricane Katrina relief in New Orleans. The research ultimately resulted in a paper on racial disparities in Hurricane Katrina relief, published in the Public Administration Review in 2010 (Vol. 70, Nr. 3, pp. 367-377). In 2012 and 2013, Craemer took groups of students to Haiti to volunteer for earthquake reconstruction and conduct research on racial stereotypes in the US media coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In 2015, Craemer published a paper on Estimating Slavery Reparations (Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 96, Nr. 2, pp. 639-655). As a result, he was invited to a 2016 conference on Reparations for Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Colonialism in the Gambia. His presentation at that conference led to a publication regarding International Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Journal of Black Studies (Vol. 49, Nr. 7, pp. 694-713). A “Comparative Analysis of Reparations for the Holocaust and for the Transatlantic Slave Trade” is currently forthcoming in the Review of Black Political Economy. His engagement with the topic of reparations has led to a pro-bono consulting role for the GU272 Isaac Hawkins Legacy Group. The group represents 200 direct descendants of Isaac Hawkins, one of 272 enslaved Americans sold in 1838 by Georgetown University to save the institution from financial ruin. Craemer’s work on reparations has been cited in Newsweek (Douglas Main, August 19, 2015), the Washington Post (Susan Svrluga, January 17, 2018), and in the Wall Street Journal (Jo Craven McGinty, February 15, 2019).