Vanessa Williamson is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and a Senior Fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies the politics of redistribution, with a focus on taxation. She is the author of Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes, and the coauthor, with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, which was named one of the ten best political books of the year by the New Yorker. She has written about tax opinion and tax politics for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage; about the Tea Party, anti-union legislation and taxpayer citizenship for the New York Times; and about democracy and organizing for Teen Vogue. She has discussed her research on NPR’s “Marketplace,” CSPAN’s “Washington Journal,” CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," and MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Williamson received her Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University.