The Center for Economy and Society (CES) at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute is excited to welcome Jerusalem Demsas as a new visiting fellow with the center.
Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about institutional failure, explored through stories that focus on housing, infrastructure, and mobility. Her work touches on citizen voice, federalism, NIMBY-ism, gentrification, race, gender, and the politics of exclusion. She was recognized for her work by the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2023 with the ASME Next Award, given to journalists under 30. She previously wrote for Vox as a policy journalist and was co-host of the politics and policy podcast The Weeds. Demsas previously worked as a staffer on political campaigns and is a graduate of the College of William and Mary.
As a visiting fellow, Demsas will draw on her experience with high-impact journalism related to America’s housing crisis to co-direct CES’s dinner series, and to help plan other activities around supply-side economic reform. Demsas’ fellowship will run through February 2024.
“In the very few years since she started writing, Jerusalem has become widely recognized as a leading voice in the single biggest economic challenge of our time: our inability to build an economy characterized by abundance rather than zero-sum conflict,” said Steven Teles, director of the Center for Economy and Society. “From her pathbreaking journalism on the housing crisis to her work on infrastructure, Jerusalem has raised first-order questions about how our economic crisis is linked to pervasive institutional failure. Jerusalem’s work bridges CES’ focus on political economy with the SNF Agora Institute’s mission of improving the quality of democracy, and help us think about how to bring our findings to a much larger audience.”
Established in February 2022 with $11 million in funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the CES is a multidisciplinary center within the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that brings together thinkers on the left and right to reinvigorate debates about politics and economics and identify new possibilities for change.