Letter from the Chair
August 1, 2011
Dear friends,
Welcome to the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago! Welcome to one of the most intellectually vibrant and challenging, multimethodological and pluridisciplinary centers of social and political inquiry in the nation. We pride ourselves at the University of Chicago on bringing together scholars who thrive on the life of the mind: theoretically inclined, empirically minded, deeply curious, and socially engaged scholars who flourish on shifting the very paradigms through which we explore and understand the political environment.
We bring together scholars with different theoretical outlooks and who use a variety of different methods, but who share one common goal: to get important questions right. While compact—standing at 31 faculty members—we thrive on productivity and excellence. This past academic year alone, 2010-2011, we celebrated the publication of nine books of extraordinary quality. To give you just a quick sense of the range and pluridisciplinarity, these works included among others John Mearsheimer’s Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (Oxford 2011), Cathy Cohen’s Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford 2011), John McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge 2010), Robert Pape’s Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Suicide Terrorism & How to Stop It (Chicago 2010), Dan Slater’s Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge 2010), and our dear late colleague, Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (Oxford 2011). (The full list is here).
In addition, the Department can now boast a leadership role in four important centers across the University. Just this summer, Michael Dawson, the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the College, was named Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (he had, incidentally been the Center’s founding Director). Lisa Wedeen, the Mary R. Morton Professor in Political Science and the College, took the reins as Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory with Moishe Postone, Professor of History and Associate Member of the Political Science Department. Linda Zerilli, the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, enters her second year as Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. And Professor Dali Yang enters his second year as the founding Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, a university-wide initiative to promote collaboration and exchange between UChicago scholars and students and their Chinese counterparts.
We are also a department on the move, growing aggressively to expand into new areas of research. In the academic year 2010-2011 alone, we appointed three promising scholars who will be joining us shortly: Michael Albertus, Iza Hussin, and Tianna Paschel. Assistant Professor Iza Hussin has already conducted path-breaking research on how the interplay and mutual constitution of religious self-understanding, indigenous elite formation, and colonial strategies for rule shaped the development of law and state structures in colonial and post-colonial Egypt, India and Malaysia. Tianna Paschel is one of the most promising young scholars in comparative race politics and explores the role that black social movements have played in the recent shift from colorblind state discourses to the adoption of ethno-racial policies in Colombia and Brazil in the 1990s. Michael Albertus, who joins the Department in July 2012 after completing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, studies land redistribution in Latin America and promises to be another significant addition to our stellar comparative politics group. These three new appointments will continue the Department’s tradition of intellectual breadth and multidisciplinary range.
We boast some of the very best and brightest graduate and undergraduate students in the country, and we place our students at remarkable universities and colleges around the country. Many of our students grow intellectually, as well, collaborating on the several large and individual research projects flourishing in the Department. (You can learn more about our students at the Student Spotlight and the Ph.D.’s on the Market sites, and about some of our major research projects here.
We welcome you to the Department and hope that you will spend a little time perusing our book feature, articles, as well as works-in-progress. We look forward to thinking with you, and we thank you for taking the time to visit with us.
Bernard E. Harcourt
Chair of the Political Science Department
The University of Chicago
