News
The department is delighted to announce that Professor Jennifer Pitts and Professor Sankar Muthu will join the Department beginning July 2007.
Julie Cooper, Betsy Sinclair, and Jong Hee Park have accepted the Department's offers of assistant professorships beginning July 2007.
The department is sad to announce the death of Lillian Cropsey on December 8, 2006. Lillian was the beloved wife of Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus Joseph Cropsey. The funeral service will be on Wednesday, December 13 at 2:00 p.m. at Bond Chapel.
The Department has scheduled a memorial service for Iris Marion Young for Sunday, November 12 at 2:00 p.m. at the Bond Chapel of the University of Chicago. Please join us as we celebrate the life of our cherished friend and colleague. A reception will follow in the Pick Hall Lounge.
Michael Dawson, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College, has just been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Earlier AAAS inductees from the department include Charles Larmore, Susanne Rudolph, John Mearsheimer, William Sewell, and Mark Hansen. Earlier AAAS inductees in political theory at Chicago include Jean Elshtain, Cass Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, David Strauss, Richard Epstein, and Richard Posner.
Prof. William Sewell has won a Senior Fellowship from the National Humanities Center for 2006-07.
Prof. Jeffrey Grynaviski and Prof. Lisa Wedeen have won Howard Foundation Fellowships for 2006-07.
The January 2005 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 1) contains a list of the top ten most downloaded articles from the American Political Science Review website in the 2002-2004 period. It includes two of our faculty, Professors Robert Pape (no. 1) and Lisa Wedeen (no. 6) and one of our graduate students, Sebastian Rosato (no. 3).
Prof. Michael Dawson, one of the nation's leading experts on race and politics, will be returning to the University of Chicago July 1 as a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College. Dawson expects to resume teaching in the Winter quarter and will teach both graduate and undergraduate courses.
Prof. Melissa Harris-Lacewell is the co-winner of the 2005 National Conference of Black Political Scientists WEB DuBois book award for her Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought.
Prof. John Padgett has been awarded a grant, entitled "Modelling Organizational Innovation in Renaissance Florence," for $600,000 over three years from the Human and Social Dynamics program of the National Science Foundation. The intellectual goals of the project are empirically to study and analytically to model the micro-historical process of organizational innovation in Renaissance Florence.
Prof. Cathy Cohen was awarded a grant of $600,000 from the Ford Foundation to study the relationship between politics, culture and sex in the lives of African American youth ages 15-25. The research project will investigate what young African Americans think about the political and social context they confront daily and how their perceived political efficacy shapes their personal decision-making in such areas as sex and intimacy.
Prof. Carles Boix won two distinguished awards for his book Democracy and Redistribution: the Mattei Dogan Prize for the Best Comparative Book of the Year (given by the Society for Comparative Research), and the William Riker best book prize from APSA's political economy section.
Prof. Patchen Markell's book, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, 2003), has been named co-winner of the 2004 First Book Award by The Foundations of Political Theory Organized Section of APSA.
May 11, 2005: Dali Yang, Chair
The January 2005 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 1) contains a list of the top ten most downloaded articles from the American Political Science Review website in the 2002-2004 period. It includes two of our faculty, Professors Robert Pape (no. 1) and Lisa Wedeen (no. 6) and one of our graduate students, Sebastian Rosato (no. 3). Congratulations to all of them!
APSA Journals' Most Downloaded Articles,
| Volume and Issue | Title | Author(s) | Abstract Views | Full Text Views |
| 97:3 | The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism | Robert A. Pape | 867 | 2,454 |
| 97:1 | Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War | James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin | 569 | 2,394 |
| 97:4 | The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory | Sebastian Rosato | 277 | 1,291 |
| 96:4 | Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change | Robert C. Lieberman | 463 | 1,222 |
| 97:2 | Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-level Governance | Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks | 429 | 1,140 |
| 96:4 | Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science | Lisa Wedeen | 328 | 1,041 |
| 98:2 | What is a Case Study and What Is It Good for? | John Gerring | 217 | 898 |
| 97:1 | Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township | Robert T. Gannett | 381 | 866 |
| 97:1 | No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955 | Barbara Harff | 306 | 812 |
| 98:1 | The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy | Beth A. Simmons and Zachary Elkins | 345 | 777 |
April 26, 2005: Dali Yang, Chair
Charles Larmore newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Professor Larmore has been newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Earlier AAAS inductees from the political science department include Susanne Rudolph, John Mearsheimer, William Sewell, and Mark Hansen. Earlier AAAS inductees in political theory and nearby fields at Chicago include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cass Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, David Strauss, Richard Epstein, and Richard Posner.
April 12, 2005: Dali Yang, Chair
Michael Dawson, leading figure in African-American political science, will return to the University of Chicago
Michael Dawson, one of the nation's leading experts on race and politics, will be returning to the University of Chicago July 1 as a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College.
He has been a faculty member at Harvard since 2002, where he has taught in the government and African-American studies departments.
"I look forward to working with my colleagues in Political Science, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and elsewhere in the University. Chicago is a great place to do research, and in the last decade, the University has made enormous progress in building African-American studies specifically and racial studies more generally," Dawson said.
Dawson added that family concerns also played a role in his decision to return. His wife, Alice Furumoto-Dawson, is joining the University's Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research as a researcher. The center is an interdisciplinary program to study early-onset breast cancer among African-American women.
Dawson expects to resume teaching in the Winter quarter and will teach both graduate and undergraduate courses. He anticipates eventually initiating some year-long sequences in the study of race and politics and black politics with colleagues in the Political Science department and the Center for Race, Politics and Culture.
"Michael Dawson has been the key scholar in deepening our understanding of race in relation to politics in the United States," said Mark Hansen, the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences and the College. "At the University of Chicago, he was also a tremendously effective leader, whose vision carries forth at the University's vibrant and innovative Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. It is both a professional and a personal pleasure to welcome one of my closest colleagues back home again. The whole campus is buoyed by his return."
"The University will celebrate Michael's return to an environment where he can foster the best research and teaching on race politics," said Provost Richard Saller.
In 2001, Dawson was named the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College.
Dawson, who is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, was co-principal investigator of the 1988 National Black Election Study and is principal investigator with Ronald Brown of the 1993-1994 National Black Politics Study. He also is principal investigator for the Black Civil Society Study. Between 2000 and 2004 Dawson and Lawrence Bobo conducted six public opinion studies on the racial divide in the United States, creating the richest data on this issue that exists. They are a currently working on a book that analyzes this data.
His research interests have included the development of quantitative models of African-American political behavior and public opinion, the political effects of urban poverty, and African-American political ideology.
He is the author of Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, published in 2001. His book Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics was published in 1994. Dawson also is the author of numerous articles on African-American political behavior and race and American politics.
He is co-editor, with Lawrence Bob, of the Du Bois Review, a journal dedicated to social science research on race.
Dawson received a B.A. in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in 1986 from Harvard University.
March 18, 2005: Dali Yang, Chair
Melissa Harris-Lacewell wins prize for her latest book
Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell is the co-winner of the 2005 National Conference of Black Political Scientists WEB DuBois book award for her Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Congratulations!
January 28, 2005: Dali Yang, Chair
New Rules Regarding Methodology as a Subfield
The faculty voted to require all incoming graduate students to take the methods course, Political Science 30500, Introduction to Data Analysis, in the first year of their graduate study.
The faculty passed a proposal to eliminate the course out option and to re-establish an exam in methods as a special option in fulfilling the second field requirement. Students wishing to exercise this option must do so by petition and in consultation with methods faculty. Students have a choice in selecting two of the four subfields of methodology: interpretive, case study, formal theory, and statistics. At least one of the two subfields must be in formal theory or statistics. (Students may choose to do both formal theory and statistics, but they cannot choose to do both interpretive and case study.) If approved, students will take the exam at the same time as the other exam offerings: the week before the beginning of Autumn Quarter and tenth week of Spring Quarter. The department will administer the exam over a two day period with each subfield in methods offering an 8 hour exam.
Application of New Rules: (1) Coursing out will remain as an option for students who entered the Department prior to and including Autumn 2003. (2) Coursing out is not an option for students who entered the Department in Autumn 2004 but PLSC 30500, Introduction to Data Analysis, is not required. Lisa Wedeen, Director of Graduate Studies, announced at both Orientation and at the subsequent qat chew that coursing out would probably not be an option for incoming Autumn 2004 students and that they should not count on coursing out as an option to fulfill the requirements of the methodology subfield. (3) The new rules will apply to students entering Autumn 2005.
August 24, 2004: Dali Yang, Chair
Please join me in contragulating Professor Patchen Markell. His book, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, 2003), has been named co-winner of the 2004 First Book Award by The Foundations of Political Theory Organized Section of APSA.
July 28, 2004: Dali Yang, Chair
Professor Carles Boix has just won two distinguished awards for his book Democracy and Redistribution: the Mattei Dogan prize for the Best Comparative Book of the Year (given by the Society for Comparative Research), and the William Riker best book prize from APSA's political economy section.
Mar 5, 2004:
Political theorist and classicist Danielle Allen appointed Dean of Humanities. See details here.
Jul 31, 2003: John Brehm, Chair
Dear colleagues: I am delighted to inform the department that faculty member Susan Stokes is the very first recipient of the Comparative Democratization section's best book award for Mandates and Democracy! This is a major APSA award and deserves our universal good wishes to Susan.
