Brooke Shannon is a Ph.D. student in the Government Department at the UT Austin. She studies public policy and American politics, focusing on urban politics and local government, agenda setting, and racial and ethnic politics. Her dissertation, The City Agenda, is about how local governments develop and make decisions, and which issues are prioritized in local and urban politics. She is the project manager of the Policy Agendas Project, housed at UT-Austin.
Before academia, Brooke taught high school Spanish in Memphis, TN and was a community organizer in her hometown of Denver, CO. A music lover, outside of work she spends her time collecting records, advocating for social justice, jogging around town, and figuring out new ways to cook tofu.