The Graduate Program
Carla Alberti
Carla_Alberti@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Carla is a first year graduate student.
Jorge Alves
Jorge_Alves@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jorge is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Salvador, Brazil. He has a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Amherst College, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. His primary field is comparative politics. Jorge's main research interests include political economy of development, state capacity and Latin American and Brazilian politics. Jorge's dissertation will focus on explaining heterogeneity in institutional capacity across branches of the Brazilian state, as well as through states and municipalities. His current research is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Jacque Amoureux
Jacque_Amoureux@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jacque Amoureux is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate working in the fields of International Relations and Political Theory. Jacque’s research interests include International Ethics, International Organizations, Foreign Policy, Security, Theories of International Relations, and Qualitative Methods. Jacque’s dissertation, “’Ethical Reflexivity’ as a Practice of International Politics: The Reform of Foreign Policymaking and International Organization Decision-Making,” inquires into practices of ethics among the actors of international politics and seeks to build an ethical practice that enacts moral agency and critical rationality. Jacque has published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies; Ethics, Authority and War: Non-State Actors in the Just War Tradition; The Encyclopedia of Campaigns, Elections and Electoral Behavior; and The Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Jacque’s dissertation is advised by Thomas Biersteker, James Der Derian, Sharon Krause and Nicholas Onuf.
Fulya Apaydin
Fulya_Apaydin@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Fulya Apaydin is a seventh year Ph.D. candidate from Istanbul, Turkey. She has a B.A. (2000) in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University, Turkey and an M.A. (2005) in Political Science from Brown University. Her research interests include comparative politics, methodology and political economy with an emphasis on politics of human capital formation in developing countries. Fulya's dissertation explores causes of variation in skill formation policies in the manufacturing sector, with a special focus on automobile production. She recently completed fifteen-months of fieldwork in Turkey and Argentina and is currently writing her dissertation.
Huss Banai
Hussein_Banai@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Hussein Banai is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He earned his B.A. in Political Science from York University in Canada, his M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK, and has also studied at Georgetown and Harvard universities in the U.S. In 2004-2005 he served as deputy editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. His research interests lie at the intersection of international and political theory with particular focus on topics in ethics and foreign policy. His current research considers the strategic uses of enmity in U.S.-Iran relations.His dissertation, "Democracy in Context: Between Universal Norms and Local Values," explores the relationship between universal democratic norms and local public cultures and offers a contextual model of democracy that seeks to resolve the tensions between them.
Maria Angelica Bautista
Maria_Bautista@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Maria Angelica Bautista is a third year graduate student from Bogota, Colombia. She has a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Economics from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota. Her main research interests are political economy, development in the long run and Latin American politics.
Kelly Bay
Kelly_Bay@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Kelly Bay is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Lake Stevens, Washington. She has a B.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Her research interests include the politics of social spending and redistributionin Latin America, as well as the relationship between citizen participation, policy success, and the quality of democracy. Her dissertation will examine these issues using the cases of school-based management in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Erin Beck
Erin_Beck@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Erin Beck is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Rochester, NY. She has a B.A. in International Business Studies from Providence College and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Her research interests include women's movements in Central America, civil society in post-conflict settings and the politics of sex and sexuality.
Elizabeth Bennett
Elizabeth_Bennett@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Elizabeth Bennett is a second year graduate student from Grosse Ile, Michigan. Elizabeth earned a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) and Graduate Certificate in International Development from the Fletcher School at Tufts University where she focused on the political economy of development and development economics. Her master’s thesis examined the nexus of US counter terrorism, counter narcotics and development policy in Afghanistan. Previously, Elizabeth interned at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington DC, taught Latin American social justice at a public high school in New York City, and worked for a Mexican non-governmental organization in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She completed her undergraduate degree in Spanish and secondary education at Hope College in Holland, MI and studied abroad in the Dominican Republic. Elizabeth’s research interests include international political economy, development, globalization, transnational civil society, global social movements, fair trade and contentious politics.
Yelena Biberman
Yelena_Biberman@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Yelena Biberman is a second year graduate student specializing in Comparative Politics as her primary field and International Relations as the secondary field. She completed her B.A. in International Relations with a focus on the Russia-US-Iran triangle at Wellesley College and Oxford University. After earning her A.M. in Regional Studies at Harvard University, Yelena undertook independent Fulbright Fellowship sponsored research on the first post-Soviet generation of Russia’s foreign policy elite, and was affiliated with the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). Afterward, she worked in Russia as a journalist and independent political analyst. Yelena’s research interests include supply-side politics, elite formation, foreign policy, and the generational approach to politics, particularly in respect to the post-Soviet space and the Middle East.
Gavril Bilev
Gavril_Bilev@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Gavril Bilev is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Sofia, Bulgaria. He has a B.A. in Political Science from Whittier College and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown. His primary field is comparative politics. Research interests include federal relations, democratization, sub-national political regimes, religion, quantitative methods, and spatial focus on Eastern Europe/post-communist states. Gavril’s dissertation explores the link between federal centralization and the nature of regional regimes in the Russian Federation using a mixed-method approach of case studies and statistical analysis.
Jennifer Cassidy
Jennifer_Cassidy@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jennifer Cassidy is a first year graduate student from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame. She plans on specializing in gender politics, in both an American and comparative context, particularly with regards to the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, second-wave feminism, and the Equal Rights Amendment (both in the USA and in Ireland). More broadly, she is interested in women's voting behavior, racial structures within the suffragette movement, and public opinion with regards to women elected officials and the First Lady.
David Blanding
David_Blanding@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
David Blanding is a second year graduate student from the Bronx, New York. He earned a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University. David's research interests include race, public policy, and the presidency.
Lachen Chernyha
Lachen_Chernyha@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Lachen Chernyha is a first year graduate student.
Nick Coburn-Palo
Nicholas_Coburn-Palo@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Nick Coburn-Palo is a second year graduate student arriving from California, where he was a high school teacher and coach at The College Preparatory School (CPS) in Oakland. For the past six years, Nick has also served as the Program Coordinator and Lead Instructor for the Ivy Scholars Program, a project administered by the International Security Studies Program at Yale University. He has been actively involved in the speech communication consulting field for over a decade. Previous appointments have included Lecturer and Assistant Director of Forensics at Weber State University in Utah, Assistant Dean at Hopkins High School in Minnesota and an Instructor for trade officials working for the Interior Ministry of the South Korean Government. His eclectic research interests include American Politics, Political Theory and Global Public Health.
Catherine Corliss
Catherine_Corliss@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Mehtab Dere
Mehtab_Dere@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Mehtab is a first year Ph.D student from New Delhi, India. He has a B.A. in International Relations from the American University of Rome, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include post-conflict reconstruction, nation building, and the behavioral sociology of political violence.
Mila Dragojevic
Mila_Dragojevic@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Mila Dragojevic is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate specializing in comparative politics as her primary field and international relations as the secondary field. Her general research interests include identity politics, migration, nationalism, civil wars, and post-conflict reconstruction. Her dissertation, titled "The Politics of Refugee Identity: Newcomers in Serbia from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, 1991-2009," examines political, social, and economic incorporation of around 300,000 newcomers who came from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia to Serbia in the early 1990s. By combining the results of a twelve-month ethnographic field research and a large-n sample survey of 1,200 respondents, she shows that on the national level, the newcomers are still doing worse compared to the locals in all three areas of incorporation. However, on a sub-national level, there is a variation in the level of incorporation among the newcomers. While the immigrants who were able to choose settled in more prosperous regions where they had a greater probability of finding employment, the survey results show that they remain socially and politically marginalized in those communities. Mila presented her work at several regional, national, and international conferences. She has been published in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.
Angelica Duran Martinez
Angelica_Duranmartinez@Brown.edu Curriculum Vitae
Angelica Duran is a third year Ph.D. candidate from Bogota, Colombia. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University. Prior to the initiation of her Ph.D., she was a Fulbright Fellow at the United Nations Secretariat in the Department of Political Affairs. Her research interests include Latin American politics, referenda in Latin America, corruption, clientelism, and the relation between organized crime and politics.
Her dissertation project explores variations in drug related violence in Colombia and Mexico. With Richard Snyder she has coauthored "Does illegality breed violence?: Drug trafficking and state-sponsored protection rackets" in Crime, Law and Social Change (2009).
Emily Farris
Emily_Farris@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Emily Farris is a third year graduate student from Birmingham, Alabama. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Urban Studies from Furman University and M.A. from Brown University. Her research interests address issues related to American urban politics. Her current work focuses on the relationship between racial and ethnic groups across history in various northeastern urban cities.
Eli Feiman
Eli_Feiman@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Brielle Harbin
Myra_Harbin@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Brielle Harbin is a second year graduate student born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and raised in California and Georgia. She has a B.A. in Government from Smith College. Brielle's primary field of interest is American politics. More specifically, she is interested in racial and gender politics. Through her research, Brielle plans to explore how the intersections of race and gender work to inform political identity as well as influence political participation and decision making. She also looks forward to examining these questions within a comparative context, including South Africa and Australia.
Jennie Ikuta
Jennie_Ikuta@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jennie Ikuta is a second year graduate student specializing in political theory. Originally from San Diego, California and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she comes to Brown by way of the University of Chicago, where she received her B.A. in political science. She is interested in how the history of political thought (particularly early modern political thought) informs and complicates the way we think about religious toleration today. Her other interests include theories of freedom and liberty, Nietzsche, and Arendt.
Alan Johnson
Alan_Johnson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Alan Johnson is a Masters student.
Jeremy Johnson
Jeremy_Johnson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jeremy Johnson is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Malvern, Pennsylvania. He has a B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in history from Villanova University, an M.P.A. in Public Administration from Villanova University, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. His concentration area is American Politics, especially American Political Development, the Presidency, Public Policy, and the Congress. His dissertation is entitled The Republican Welfare State. He has been published in White House Studies and The Second Term of George W. Bush: Prospects and Perils.
Meri Kulmala
Meri_Kulmala@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Meri Kulmala is a visiting graduate student at Brown working in Comparative Politics. She is of the Finnish Graduate School for Russian and East European Studies and a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki. Her reserch interests include state-society relations, social welfare and women's activism in Post-Soviet Russia. Her dissertation explores interrelations between the local governance and civil society organizations in Russian Karelia. For her research she conducted an intesive ethnographic field work in a small town in Karelia. Before her doctoral studies, she has worked for many years in the field of civic organizations. In 2006, she was in a research exchange at the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Matthew Lieber
Matthew_Lieber@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew A. Lieber is a seventh year Ph.D. candidate from New Haven, USA. He has a B.A. in history from Carleton College and an M.A. in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. He is presently writing his dissertation on the effects of migration and economic remittances upon political institutions in Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Anthony Lopez
Anthony_Lopez@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Anthony C. Lopez is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate studying international relations and political psychology. His interests are broad and interdisciplinary, incorporating especially evolutionary theory, anthropology and psychology into dynamic models of political behavior. Current interests include investigating war as the product of an evolved psychology designed for navigating complex coalitional landscapes. Anthony has a B.A. in Political Studies from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and an M.A. in Global Finance, Trade and Economic Integration from the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in Colorado.
Minh Ly
Minh_Ly@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Minh Ly is a second year doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. His research in political philosophy focuses on issues of democratic theory, deliberation, liberalism, and global justice. Before coming to Brown, Ly earned his A.B. in social studies from Harvard University, writing his senior honor thesis on a theory of human rights under the direction of Professor Stanley Hoffmann. Ly previously worked as a research assistant for Professor Dennis Thompson (summer 2004) and for Professor Graham Allison (2005-2008) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Matthew J. Lyddon
Matthew_Lyddon@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew J. Lyddon is a first year graduate student from Wales, United Kingdom. Matt has a B.A. in Politics and Philosophy and an M.A. in Ethics and Social Philosophy, both from Cardiff University. He specializes in political theory, with interests in political liberalism, democratic citizenship and civic education. Matt returns to academia following a four-year break, during which he established a career in higher education marketing and student recruitment at Cardiff, while also co-authoring an educational resource exploring the development of democracy in Britain.
Richard Maher
Richard_Maher@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Rich Maher is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Muskegon, Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, an M.Sc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Maher’s research interests include international relations theory, American foreign and security policy, and European politics, particularly in the foreign and security policy domains. His dissertation studies European foreign and security policy cooperation, particularly factors and forces either motivating or impeding this process, while also looking at the transformation of the European security context since the end of the Second World War and how this has shaped European states’ interests, identities, and foreign policy behavior.
David McMillan
David_McMillan@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Eduardo Moncada
Eduardo_Moncada@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Eduardo Moncada is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Providence, RI. He has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Long Island University's Friends World Program, an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Miami, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Eduardo's research interests include international development, comparative democratization, the rule of law, and the quality of democracy in Latin America. His dissertation research is a subnational comparative analysis of how different types of violence and economic interests shape political coalitions to make security a public good in Latin America. His research is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright program, the Watson Institute for International Studies, and others.
Domingo Morel
Domingo_Morel@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Domingo Morel is a first year graduate student from Providence, RI. He has a B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Rhode Island and an M.A. in Counseling from Rhode Island College. His research interests are in American Politics and Political Theory with a focus on African American and Latino politics. He is co-founder of the Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University and is an adjunct faculty member in the African and African American Studies Department at the University of Rhode Island.
Feryaz Ocakli
Feryaz_Ocakli@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Feryaz Ocakli is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Kocaeli, Turkey. He has a B.Sc. in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. Feryaz’s research focuses on comparative politics, political economy of development, and Turkish politics. His dissertation research is on Islamist and ethnic political change and localized party strategies.
Andrea Owens-Jones
Andrea_Owens-Jones@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Andrea Owens-Jones is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate from Americus, Georgia. She has B.A. in Political Science from Mercer University and an M.A. in Political Science from Georgia State University. Her research interests include urban community and economic development (with a focus on Black historic districts) and African-American political participation. Her recent research examines the politics of economic redevelopment in the Auburn Avenue Historic District (Atlanta, GA). Owens-Jones has presented her graduate research at the Southern Political Science Conference (2005) and the Urban Affairs Conference (2006).
Cecilia Perla
Cecilia_Perla@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Cecilia Perla is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from Lima, Peru, concentrating on Comparative Politics and International Relations. She has a B.A. in Economics from Universidad Católica del Perú, an M.A. in Development Economics from the Institute of Social Studies in The Netherlands and an M.A. from Brown University. Before graduate school, she workedin development projects for governmental and private institutions in Peru. Her broad interests include comparative politics and the political economy of natural resource extraction in Latin America. Cecilia's dissertation looks at the political and institutional impactsof social investment programs of multinational corporations in the mining sector in Peru. Her research is supported by the Inter American Foundation.
John Phillips
John_Phillips@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
John Phillips isa seventh year Ph.D. candidate from Paris, France. He has a B.A. in Political Economy and German Studies from Williams College and an M.A.in Political Science from Brown University. He is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation on the role of natural resources in political and economic thought. His thesis is that uncertainty about the future supply of resources andrecognition oftheinnovative powers of entrepreneurship and the subjectivity ofmarket valueought to guide our thinking about scarcity,rather than the prevalentstatist view where the task is to centrally distribute a finite quantity of an objectively valuable resource.His other research interests include questions of political boundaries, civic education, democratic theory, and cultural identity.
Francisco Resnicoff
Francisco_Resnicoff@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Francisco Resnicoff is a third year graduate student from Coronel Suarez, Argentina. He has a B.A. in Political Science from University of Buenos Aires, an M.A. in International Relations from Torcuato Di Tella University, and an MA in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Tufts University. His areas of interest are comparative politics, political economy, and Latin America.
Fiorella Jazmin Sierra
Fiorella_Sierra@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jazmin Sierra is a first year student from Buenos Aires, Argentina, focusing on International Relations and Comparative Politics. She has a B.A. in International Studies from Torcuato Di Tella University. Her research interests include the political economy of development, energy markets and emergent powers.
Heather Silber
Heather_Silber@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Heather Silber is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate from Gainesville, Florida. She has a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University, an M.Sc. in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Heather's current research focuses on identity and political behavior among Latinos in the United States, exploring variation in mobilization around immigration issues. Before coming to Brown, Heather worked for six years in the U.S. Congress.
Jason Swadley
Jason_Swadley@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jason Swadley is a first year graduate student studying 17th-18th century liberalism and the history of the idea of self-interest. He received bachelor's degrees from Drury University in rhetoric and American political science and a master's degree in political theory from the University of Chicago. He is adjunct faculty at Drury and teaches courses online on American politics, elections, and the ethics of war.
Christopher Tallent
Christopher_Tallent@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Chris Tallent is a third year graduate student originally from Norman, OK, and more recently from Baltimore, MD. He has a B.A. in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University. He is interested in questions of social justice and distribution and how these issues relate to our conceptions of identity, democracy, and the individual. Moreover, he is generally interested in how both ideal and non-ideal considerations inform our approach to questions of social justice, and he is specifically interested in issues of macroeconomic policy-making options in the neoliberal context. Additionally, Chris is interested in how continental theory and analytic approaches may inform our understanding of social movements that relate to these questions.
Megan Turnbull
Megan_Turnbull@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Megan Turnbull is a first year graduate student from New York. She received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and her M.A. from Leiden University in The Netherlands, both in Political Science. Her primary field is political theory and she is specifically interested in the ways in which political liberalism conceives of public and private spheres in liberal societies.
Molly Wallace
Mary_Wallace@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Molly Wallace is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Salem, Oregon (USA). She has a B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Shehas studied at both the European Peace University in Austria, and the University of Dakar in Senegal. Her sub-fields are International Relations and Political Theory, and her dissertation focuses on the use of nonviolent action in international politics. The dissertation investigates both nonviolent struggle and nonviolent intervention as forms of political action that might fulfill the same purposes served by military action.Before graduate school, she spent four years in Washington, DC, workingin the area ofconflict resolutionat AMIDEAST and the Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution.
Katharina Wichtlhuber
Katharina_Wichtlhuber@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Katharina Wichtlhuber is a visiting graduate student from Germany. She ist studying law, concentrating on International and European Law at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg. She has been working as a research assistant at the University of Wuerzburg in the fields of International and European Law. She is a DAAD fellow and visiting the Department of Political Science for the academic year 2009/2010. Her main research interest is International Relations.