Rich Forgette is Associate Provost and Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi.  Professor Forgette’s research and teaching fields are in the study of Congress, legislatures, institutional reform, and community resilience.

Rich is the author of three books and numerous journal articles on the U.S. Congress, the federal spending process, voting rights and redistricting, federal disaster management, and public budgeting.  His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security.  He has led interdisciplinary research teams assessing disaster recovery and security after Hurricane Katrina creating measures and models of community resilience to withstand large-scale disasters.

He received his B.A. from Pennsylvania State University, an M.A. degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.S. in Public Policy Analysis and Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Rochester.  Rich served for 11 years on the faculty at Miami University, and he was the American Political Science Association’s Steiger Congressional Fellow in 1996-97 working in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.