News
2.17.12 - Professor Harcourt on mass court hearing for Occupy Chicago arrests
Professor Bernard Harcourt's op-ed about the mass court hearing on the Occupy Chicago arrests made last fall was featured in The Guardian. Read it here.
2.15.12 - Brandon Terry to Join the Department
The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Brandon Terry will be joining the Department as Assistant Professor on July 1, 2014. Read more here.
2.14.12 - Benjamin Lessing to Join the Department
The Department of Political Science is very pleased to announce that Benjamin Lessing will be joining the Department as Assistant Professor. Read more here.
2.3.12 - Professor Bob Pape on Humanitarian Intervention
The New York Times featured Professor Bob Pape's op-ed about the need for a new standard of humanitarian intervention, and why the U.S. should not yet intervene in Syria. Read it here.
1.20.12 - University Creates Institute of Politics
The University of Chicago creates an Institute of Politics for students interested in careers in public and social service. With David Axelroad as the inaugural director, the institute will offer extracurricular opportunities to study and participate in the civic life in Chicago and around the U.S. Read more here.
1.20.12 - Professor Bernard Harcourt's Editorial in the Guardian
Professor Bernard Harcourt wrote this editorial for The Guardian about Mayor Rahm Emanuel expanding his executive power and suppressing political dissent on the pretext of the upcoming G8/NATO summits. Read more here.
1.11.12 - The Boston Review Features Michael Dawson
Professor Michael Dawson's article on black politics is the feature article for the Boston Review's forum, The Future of Black Politics. There have been five responses to Professor Dawson posted so far, with three more planned this week. Dawson will then offer his own response at the end of this week. Read Dawson's article and the responses here.
1.11.12 - Department of Political Science ranked 6th for IR programs
The University of Chicago's Department of Political Science has been ranked 6th among International Relations programs for Ph.D. students, according to Foreign Policy's Inside the Ivory Tower. See the full rankings and read more about the survey here.
1.10.12 - Foreign Policy Lists John Mearsheimer as One of the Most Influential IR Scholars
Professor John Mearsheimer was recently featured in Foreign Policy's Inside the Ivory Tower as one of the most influential International Relations scholars as voted by his peers. He answers five foreign policy questions about challenges facing the U.S. and is voted as producing some of the most interesting IR work.
1.10.12 - Professor John Mearsheimer Featured in The Atlantic
Robert D. Kaplan wrote an in-depth feature article about Professor John Mearsheimer for The Atlantic. Kaplan discusses the influence of Mearsheimer's thought and the overall importance of his life's work. Read the article here.
1.9.12 - Professor Michael Dawson on Social Mobility in the U.S.
Professor Michael Dawson's op-ed piece on the decline of social mobility in the U.S. is featured in the New York Times. Dawson discusses the growing consensus that the U.S. may not be the "land of opportunity" the American dream claims it is, and proposes some possible starting points for a solution. Read the article here.
1.4.12 - Professor William Howell on the Iowa Caucus
Professor William Howell's op-ed piece on the Iowa caucus is featured on CNN.com. Howell says that we should thank Iowa for hosting the first caucus and that a small state like Iowa is the perfect place to start the primary and caucus schedule. Read more here.
11.14.11 - Professor William Howell on School Board Elections
Professor William Howell appeared on NPR's All Things Considered to talk about the effects of national politics at local elections. Listen to the story here.
11.10.11 - Professor John McCormick Discussing the Nature of Wealth in America on WBEZ
Last night, Professor John McCormick joined Professor Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University on WBEZ's Worldview to discuss income disparity and U.S. political economy. Listen to the story here.
11.08.11 - Professor Michael Dawson Discusses the Suppression of Minority Voting in a New York Times Op-Ed Piece
Professor Michael Dawson's op-ed piece on fighting suppression of minority voting appeared in the New York Times Opinion Pages. The piece is part of a debate entitled "Should Voting Be Mandatory? Or are there already too many people casting ballots?" featuring six debaters. Read Professor Dawson's piece here.
10.28.11 - Michael Dawson Talks About His New Book
Professor Michael Dawson on his new book, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics. The book is the first of three in the Fragmented Rainbow project. Watch it here.
10.25.11 - Professor Tom Ginsburg Discusses Libya's New Constitution in the Chicago Tribune
Professor Tom Ginsburg wrote an opinion piece about Libya's new constitution and the lessons Libya can learn from Iraq. Read the article here.
10.19.11 - Michael Dawson's New Book Published
The Department of Political Science is pleased to announce the publication of Michael Dawson's new book, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics. Read more about the book, from the University of Chicago Press, here.
10.19.11 - Professor Bernard Harcourt Discusses the Occupy Chicago Movement on WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight Program
Bernard Harcourt joined Alison Cuddy and Micah Philbrook from Occupy Chicago to talk about the movement and answer listeners' questions. Listen to the story here.
Professor Bernard Harcourt's Article on the Occupy Wall Street Movement Featured in the New York Times Opinion Pages
Bernard Harcourt's article on the Occupy Wall Street movement is featured in the New York Times Opinion Pages. View the article here.
Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph Win Mellon Fellowship
Professors Emeriti Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have been awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship. The Rudolphs plan to use the fellowship to support their research in India, Britain, and the U.S. relating to their project titled "Romanticism's Child: An Intellectual History of James Tod's Influence on Indian History and Historiography."
The University of Chicago Rises in National College Rankings
The University of Chicago rose in the rankings to #5 (tied with four other schools) in the most recent U.S. News & World Report National University Rankings. See the rankings here.
Political Science Job Market Improving, APSA Reports
The American Political Science Association reports that the job market for political scientists is improving. Read more here.
Professor Bernard Harcourt Interviewed in Harper's Magazine
Bernard Harcourt was recently interviewed in Harper's Magazine about his new book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. You can read the interview here.
Professor and Chair Bernard Harcourt Provides News of the Department in Annual Letter
See Bernard Harcourt's letter of news from the Department here.
Michael Dawson Named Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Michael Dawson, John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the College, has accepted a three-year term as Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture commencing July 1, 2011. Dawson will succeed Ramon A. Gutierrez, the Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History and the College.
Professor Dawson, one of the nation’s leading experts on race and politics, was the Center’s founding Director. His return promises to advance innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, public engagement with matters of race, ethnicity, politics and culture, and community building on campus and beyond.
With research interests ranging from quantitative work to political theory, Professor Dawson’s scholarship has included the development of quantitative models of African American political behavior, identity, and public opinion; explored the political effects of urban poverty; and characterized African American political ideology. His work also delineates the differences between African American public opinion and that of Caucasian Americans. In addition to numerous journal publications, book chapters and opinion pieces, Dawson has authored two books, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton 1994) and the award winning Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago 2001). A third book, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics, is being published by the University of Chicago Press this Fall. Principal investigator on several significant studies of African American political behavior, Professor Dawson is also known for his project with Lawrence Bobo in which they conducted six public opinion studies on the racial divide in the United States. The information they gathered between 2000 and 2004 is considered the richest data on the issue. With Bobo he is also the co-founding editor of the Du Bois Review, the leading social science journal on racial research.
Professor Dawson has been a member of the University of Chicago faculty since 1992, with a brief interregnum at Harvard University from 2002 to 2005. In addition to his role as founding Director of the Center, Dawson has served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Mellon Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Dawson received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1986.
Assistant Professor Paul Staniland Wins APSA Award
The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Assistant Professor Paul Staniland has won the 2011 Kenneth N. Waltz Award from the American Political Science Association’s International Security and Arms Control section for best dissertation submitted in 2010.
Professor Staniland’s dissertation, “Explaining Cohesion, Fragmentation, and Control in Insurgent Groups,” examines why insurgent groups so dramatically vary in their unity and discipline. It argues that the foundational social networks of organizations shape the ability of militant leaders to create strong institutions. Professor Staniland did fieldwork in India, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland for the thesis. His research was supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, MIT Center for International Studies, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies and Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, United States Institute of Peace, and Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University.
Professor Staniland joined the Department in 2010, after obtaining his Ph.D. from MIT. His research interests are in civil war, international security, and ethnic politics, primarily in South Asia. He also co-directs the University of Chicago’s Program on International Security Policy.
Tom Ginsburg to Join the Department as Associate Member
The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Professor Tom Ginsburg has been appointed an associate member of the department. Tom Ginsburg is professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and most recently the recipient of the 2010 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Comparative Democratization for The Endurance of National Constitutions, co-authored with Zachary Elkins and James Melton (Cambridge UP, 2009). His work focuses primarily on comparative constitutional law and politics and he and his colleagues have assembled one of the most remarkable datasets of all modern constitutions across the globe. Professor Ginsburg had also won the American Political Science C. Herman Pritchett Award for Best Book on Law and Courts in 2004 for his book Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
In addition to the two APSA-award-winning books, Professor Ginsburg has co-authored Comparative Legal Institutions, with Francesco Parisi and Guy Seidman (Aspen Publishing, forthcoming 2011), and has authored or co-authored over 80 accepted and published articles and book chapters. Prior to teaching, Tom Ginsburg spent two years working as a legal advisor for the Iran-US Claims Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, from 1998-2000. He has also held various academic and professional positions in Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, South Korea, Israel, Italy, Tajikistan, and Montenegro. Professor Ginsburg also served as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations (2002-2007).
Professor Ginsburg earned his Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, and his J.D. from Berkeley in 1997.
A pdf copy of this announcement can be found here.
Charles Lipson Awarded the Quantrell Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
The Department of Political Science is pleased to announce that Professor Charles Lipson has been awarded the 2011 Quantrell Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. For more information about the award, please see here.
Lisa Wedeen Named the Mary R. Morton Professor in Political Science and the College
The Department of Political Science is happy to announce that Professor Lisa Wedeen has been named the Mary R. Morton Professor in Political Science and the College. Please see the announcement here.
Political Science Department Celebrates Published Scholarship
We are proud to report that the Political Science Department has had a remarkably productive academic year 2010-2011. Among other achievements, faculty members in the department published nine (9) monographs this academic year, which, for a relatively small faculty of only 31 faculty members, is impressive and matched only by the quality of the work and the prestige of the presses that published the books.
Members of the Political Science faculty will celebrate these publications at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 5, in the Tea Room in the Social Science Research Building. Faculty colleagues in other departments are invited to join the festivities.
The Political Science faculty members and their books being recognized at the event are Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011); Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, 2011); Gary Herrigel, Manufacturing Possibilities: Creative Action and Industrial Recomposition in the United States, Germany, and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2010); John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2010); John Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011); Eric Oliver, The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Robert Pape and James Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Suicide Terrorism & How to Stop It (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press 2010); and the late Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011).
The books cross a wide range of fields and employ multiple research methods. These methods include archival, interpretive, qualitative and quantitative approaches, case studies and sophisticated statistical models.
The research that went into publishing these books also provided opportunities for graduate students to work closely with faculty as they wrote about the topics they explored.
Michael Albertus to Join the Department of Political Science
The University of Chicago Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Michael Albertus will be joining the Department as Assistant Professor.
Michael Albertus is one of the most promising young scholars studying the politics of redistribution in social science today. His research on “Political Regimes and Redistribution” examines the relationship between political institutions and redistributive government policies, with a focus on land reform in Latin America. Albertus brings together a remarkable combination of in-depth fieldwork, data collection on land redistribution through archival work and collaboration with land reform agencies in numerous Latin American countries, high-level formal analytic and empirical skills, remarkable productivity, and a deep commitment to Latin America.
He has published on authoritarian durability in Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies, and he has a number of articles currently under review, including his innovative and impressive article “Democracy and the Threat of Redistribution: Evidence from Latin America,” a paper that identifies the scope conditions under which democratization induces greater redistribution entitled “Gaming Democracy: Elite Dominance During Transition and the Prospects for Redistribution,” and his detailed case study of redistributive land reform in “Redistribution by Revolution from Above: Land Reform in Peru, 1968-80.”
Michael Albertus is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Bradley Graduate Research Predoctoral Fellowship at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation Graduate Fellowship, and an Ayacucho Foundation grant through Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies for fieldwork in Venezuela.
Michael Albertus is completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and earned a B.S. in political science, a B.S.E. in electrical engineering, and a B.S. in mathematical sciences, all from the University of Michigan. (1/24/2011)
A pdf copy of this announcement can be found here.
Assistant Professor Tianna Paschel to Join the Department of Political Science
Tianna Paschel is the most promising young scholar in comparative race politics today in the disciplines of political science and sociology. Her research examines 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. Tianna Paschel comes to us from the Sociology Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is completing her dissertation titled States, Movements and the New Politics of Blackness in Colombia and Brazil. It draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including over a hundred in-depth interviews, participation in a wide range of events, and extensive analyses of government documents.
Tianna Paschel makes several major contributions that will have critical and lasting impact in political science, sociology, and the study of race. By focusing on two Latin American countries, her research is a call to move beyond the archetypical case of the United States, and instead analyze how common histories of racial domination and slavery can produce distinct racial politics. In so doing, she also shows that while there has been a general shift toward the politicization of ethno-racial identities throughout this region, there are many important differences between countries. Tianna’s work also intervenes in the social movement literature by demonstrating how various approaches to the study of social movements (framing, political process theory, and transnational approaches) are collectively necessary for explaining the development of black social movements in Colombia and Brazil. Also, by analyzing how black movement actors negotiate, inhabit and contest the newly formed structures of political representation set up for black populations, Tianna reveals a reality of social movement institutionalization that is much more complex than the literature suggests.
Tianna Paschel is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Fulbright, Mellon and Ford. Her article “The Right to Difference: Explaining Colombia’s Shift from Color-Blindness to the Law of Black Communities” is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology. She will be in residence as a fellow in July 2011 and will begin as Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in July 2012. (12/21/2010)
A pdf copy of this announcement can be found here.
Assistant Professor Iza Hussin to Join the Department of Political Science
The University of Chicago Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Iza Hussin will be joining the Department in July 2011.
Both as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and as a Visiting Fellow in the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, Iza Hussin has 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.
With her strong grounding in social theory from across the social sciences (comparative politics, history, civilizational studies, critical legal theory, and anthropology), her extensive field work, and her linguistic fluency in the multiple regions that she studies, Iza Hussin is sure to place a signature stamp on the discipline and on the Department of Political Science. We expect her bold, creative and highly original research and writings to have a significant impact on discussions of the British colonial experience and the emergence of the modern Muslim state in the post-colonial world. Iza Hussin will contribute greatly and further reinforce the University of Chicago’s premier interpretivist faculty in comparative politics.
Iza Hussin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the American Political Science Association’s 2009 Walter Dean Burnham Prize in Politics and History, the International Convention of Asia Scholar’s 2009 award for best Ph.D. in the social sciences, and the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship (from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) in 2007. Her first book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Iza Hussin earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University. (12/20/2010)
For more information, please see the announcement here.
Please click here for Professor Bernard Harcourt’s recent letter of news of the Department
The University of Chicago Law School proudly congratulates Bernard Harcourt, the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law, on his recent election and three-year appointment as the new Chair of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science.
Harcourt has held a joint appointment as a Professor of Political Science for several years. His scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, criminal law and procedure, and criminology. In true Chicago interdisciplinary fashion, he will continue teaching and will remain active at the Law School while he leads the Department of Political Science.
"I look forward to building strong interdisciplinary ties with my colleagues at the Law School and other divisions at Chicago," Harcourt said. "There is a long tradition of interdisciplinary work in law and politics at Chicago, one that infused the work of noted former colleagues like Jon Elster, Stephen Holmes, Bernard Manin, and Cass Sunstein. We have a lot to build on in this area. It will be a very productive and exciting three years."
"The Chicago Political Science Department brings together a pluralist cutting-edge group of scholars with a rich tradition of its own," he added. "The tradition goes back to Charles Merriam in the 1920s, to Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, Leo Strauss, and to many others. It has come to be known as the 'Chicago School of political science,' a school dedicated historically to combining rich theoretical approaches with rigorous methods on deep questions of political and social importance."
Harcourt received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1989 and received his Ph.D. in political science from the Government Department at Harvard in 2000. He joined the Law School faculty in 2003.
In 2009, he was awarded the annual Gordon J. Laing Prize for his book Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in the Actuarial Age. The Laing Prize honors the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the University of Chicago Press's list. (6/16/2010)
