Winston Berg

Winston Berg is a political scientist and Lecturer on Social Studies. His research focuses on how political communities form and defend beliefs under conditions of uncertainty—especially when traditional sources of epistemic authority, like experts, institutions, and consensus, lose their grip.

His first book project, The Infrastructure of Conspiracy Theories, draws on ethnographic, computational, and interpretive methods to examine how these communities sustain coherence not through elite manipulation or media isolation, but through the creation of their own internal norms of sense-making. Instead of asking why people believe strange things, the book explores how they come to trust one another, organize information, and make meaning, even when they remain skeptical of almost everyone else.

Beyond conspiracy theories, his work reflects a broader interest in pluralism, political epistemology, and how democracy can function even when people don’t agree on basic facts—and maybe never will. Before joining Harvard, Berg received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, where he also taught in the Social Sciences Core sequence “Self, Culture and Society.”