Professor Clark is a scholar of American politics with an interest in the non-democratic uses and consequences of democratic political institutions. His research and teaching interests are in the political economy of judicial politics, policing and public safety, as well as applied formal theory and statistical methodology.

Clark has published three books, including the co-authored Judicial Decision-Making: A Coursebook (West Academic, 2020), The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making (Cambridge, 2019), and The Limits of Judicial Independence (Cambridge, 2011). His work has appeared in a number of leading political science journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Clark was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2008. 

Professor Clark's research website

Ramón Garibaldo Valdéz studies social movements, U.S. Latinx politics, and immigration. His current book project is entitled, “La lucha de cada día: Immigrant Justice Organizing and the Political Remaking of Illegality in the U.S.” Based on three years of ethnographic research, it centers immigrant justice organizations, led by and representing undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, as key actors in American democracy. It chronicles and analyzes immigrant-led community organizing, exploring the strategies employed by these communities to advance welcoming social policies, create long-lasting political infrastructures, and even organize inside detention centers. 

Ramón earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil degrees from Yale University’s Political Science Department, and a B.A. in political science from Johnson C. Smith University, a Historically Black College in North Carolina. Ramón is a passionate advocate of activist research, ethnographic methods, and grounded theorizing in the study of politics.  

Robert Gulotty is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His first book project is Governing Trade Beyond Tariffs: The politics of multinational production and its implications for international cooperation. He is also engaged in research on the origins of the international trade regime and the effects of domestic institutions on foreign economic policymaking. This research includes a book project, Opening of the American market: rules, norms and coalitions with Judith Goldstein. Gulotty’s work appears in International Organization, The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, and The World Trade Report. He has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Stanford Center for International Development and the Department of Political Science.

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. 

Chiara Cordelli is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her main areas of research are social and political philosophy, with a particular focus on theories of distributive justice, political legitimacy, normative defenses of the state, and the public/private distinction in liberal theory. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR political theory prize for best first book in political theory. She is also the co-editor of, and a contributor to, Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016). 

Cordelli’s articles and contributions to symposia appeared in the American Political Science Review, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Studies Review, as well as in several edited volumes, including NOMOS. One of her articles, “Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources” was included in the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2015 and her chapter “Philanthropy as a Duty of Reparative Justice” won the 2018 Review of Politics Award.

Cordelli earned her BA in philosophy from the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she studied aesthetics, critical theory, and the history of political thought. During her MA at University College London, she became interested in analytic philosophy. She earned her PhD in political philosophy from UCL in 2011. Before joining Chicago in 2015, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University (2011-2013) and a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Exeter, UK (2013-2015). She held visiting positions at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in D.C. (2009-2010), the Center for Human Values at Princeton (2014-2015), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2012-2013), the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard (2017-2018) and the LIER center at EHESS in Paris (2021-2022).

Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where his area of research and teaching is international relations.  Please visit his personal website to learn more about his research, writing, and teaching.

Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She was the 2010-16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues in her capacity as a leading scholar and teacher in the field. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. In 2016, Professor Zerilli won the University faculty award for excellence in graduate teaching and mentoring. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture,Theory and Critique. 

Professor Dali Yang (PhD, Princeton, 1993) is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles on the politics and political economy of China. Among his books are Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (Stanford University Press, 2004); Beyond Beijing: Liberalization and the Regions in China (Routledge, 1997); and Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford University Press, 1996). He is also editor of Discontented Miracle: Growth, Conflict, and Institutional Adaptations in China (World Scientific, 2007) and co-editor and a contributor to Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in Post-Deng China (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is a member of various committees and organizations and serves on the editorial boards of Asian Perspective, American Political Science Review, Journal of Contemporary China, and World Politics.

James Lindley Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests span political philosophy, ethics, and law. Most of his work focuses on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and  what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions. His book, Democratic Equality (Princeton University Press, 2019), articulates the moral force of the democratic idea that all citizens are equal political authorities, and to explain how that abstract idea ought to regulate the design and operation of political institutions, such as elections and representative systems. This involves development of philosophical theories of social equality and of authority relations. The book also addresses practical political controversies—criticizing unequal representation in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College; defending the legitimacy of campaign finance regulation; addressing the fair representation of groups, including racial minorities; and explaining the proper place of judicial review in a democracy. In responding to such applied questions in a philosophically principled way, Jim’s work on political equality aims to provide a deeper understanding of democracy’s value, and its close relation to other ideals of social, economic, and racial equality. Democratic Equality was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Order of the Coif Book Award for “outstanding publications that evidence creative talent of the highest order” in legal studies and related fields. 

Jim also writes on the history of political thought (with emphasis on democratic thought), including the work of Aristotle, Kant, and the Federalists. His current work addresses the relationship of democracy and individual autonomy; global political justice; and moral problems occasioned by democratic backsliding and political violence. He has published articles in Philosophy & Public Affairs, the American Political Science Review, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Review of Politics.

Classes Jim has taught include Racial Justice and Injustice; Freedom, Justice, and Legitimacy (w/ Chiara Cordelli); Democracy and Equality; Global Justice and the Politics of Empire (w/ Adom Getachew); Contemporary Egalitarianism; The Ethics of War; Introduction to Political Theory; John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (w/ Chiara Cordelli); and Classics of Social and Political Thought I, II, and III.

Jim received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2011, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2007. He graduated from Harvard University, with an A.B. in Social Studies, in 2002.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020), sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group; the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award (2022), given annually for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press. She has completed an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (forthcoming Duke University Press, 2024); she is in the process of coediting an Oxford University Handbook, with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press); and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.). Wedeen is also beginning work on a monograph on violence and temporality.