The Graduate Program
Carla Alberti
Carla_Alberti@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Carla is a third year PhD candidate from Santiago, Chile. She has a BA in Political Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Currently, Carla holds a Fulbright scholarship to pursue graduate studies in United States. She focuses on International Relations and Comparative Politics. Her main research interests are the political economy of internal armed conflict and development studies.
Maria Angelica Bautista
Maria_Bautista@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Maria Angelica Bautista is a fifth year PhD candidate 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.
Erin Beck
Erin_Beck@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Erin Beck is a seventh year Ph.D. candidate from Rochester, NY, with a B.A. in International Business Studies from Providence College and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Erin was twice awarded the Graduate Program in Development Summer Travel Fellowship, and in 2008 was awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her current research project, funded by Fulbright-Hays and Brown University's Dissertation Fellowship, focuses on rural women's participation in NGOs in Guatemala. In this project, Erin examines the factors that affect women's decisions to join and stay in particular NGOs, as well as the impact these decisions have on women's broader empowerment. Erin's research interests broadly include gender politics in Latin America, the role of NGOs in developing countries, and micro-politics. More information about Erin can be found at ErinEBeck.com.
Elizabeth Bennett
Elizabeth_Bennett@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Elizabeth Bennett is a fourth year PhD candidate in international relations and comparative politics. Her dissertation studies voluntary, ethical certifications as a form of private global governance by examining the institutions that facilitate “fair trade” in coffee. Elizabeth’s research is included in the edited volume The Practices and Processes of Fair Trade (Routledge 2012), and is supported by the American Council on Germany, the Tinker Foundation, and the Watson Institute for International Studies. Elizabeth is also co-author of The Civic Imagination (Paradigm Press, forthcoming), a collaborative, interdisciplinary ethnography of political engagement in America. Her research interests include: international development, activism, North-South civil society organizations, ethical certifications, and civic engagement. Before Brown, Elizabeth earned a MALD in political economy and international development from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, interned at USAID in Washington DC, taught in a public high school in New York City, worked for a Mexican NGO, and taught at the Tisch College for Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.
Puneet Bhasin
Puneet_Bhasin@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Puneet Bhasin is a first year graduate student in International Relations. He holds an M.Sc. in Comparative Politics (politics and markets) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.S. in Computer Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a B.E. in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Mumbai. Prior to Brown, he was working for technology and business consulting firms in New York for nine years, and more recently, with organizations such as the Institute of Development Studies-Jaipur and the Center for Micro Finance in India. Puneet is interested in topics of international political economy, issues of inequality, and the politics of economic ideas. He seeks to explore why and how ideas of market liberalism undermine the collective imagination on redistribution to a greater extent in some polities than in others. He is particularly interested in analyzing state and non-state forms of social protection in the new market economies of Asia and Latin America, with an aim to expand the different “worlds of welfare capitalism.” His interest in the role of ideas also extends toward researching how dominant theories and “conventional wisdom” about the economy play out during moments of crisis and how this affects institutional change.
Yelena Biberman
Yelena_Biberman@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Yelena Biberman is a fourth year PhD candidate 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 dissertation examines Pakistan's foreign policy, 1947-2001.
Gavril Bilev
Gavril_Bilev@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Gavril Bilev is an eighth 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 University. Gavril specializes in comparative politics with a focus on Eastern Europe/post-communist states. His teaching and research interests include democratization, sub-national political regimes, formal institutions, the inter-branch balance of power, and quantitative methods. Gavril’s dissertation explores why structurally similar Russian regions display significant variation in the executive-legislative balance of power with important implications for political contestation. Analysis of the two pairs of controlled comparisons employs semi-structured interviews with elites and experts, along with newspaper and archival records collected during year-long fieldwork. He finds that the eligibility rules for representatives in regional assemblies play a critical role in explaining variation in executive-legislative balance of power at the sub-national level. Gavril has won a number of competitive awards, including the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Brown University Graduate School Fellowship.
David Blanding
David_Blanding@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
David Blanding is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate from The Bronx, New York. David earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Boston University and a Master of Arts in Political Science from Brown. He is currently constructing an original multi-level time-series dataset as part of his dissertation, which examines the role of public opinion in the evolution of American civil rights. The project asks why some civil rights, like school segregation, have evolved in peaks and valleys, while others, like voting rights, have evolved monotonically. Broadly, David’s research interests lie at the intersection of scholarship on race politics, public opinion, public policy, and the American presidency, and his research has appeared or will appear in the Harvard Educational Review and State Politics and Policy Quarterly.
Jennifer Cassidy
Jennifer_Cassidy@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jennifer Caitlin Cassidy is a third year Ph.D. candidate from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has a B.A. in Political Science and Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Jenn’s research resides primarily in the field of women in American politics with relevant intersections to political theory. Her dissertation focuses on gender theories of representation with special focus on the position of women within the American bureaucracy (including both appointments and the Civil Service), policy and public opinion. Additionally, Jenn has broader interests in education policy, quantitative methodology, critical elections, political parties, and theories of deliberative democracy. Her most recent project, co-authored with Domingo Morel (Brown University), is titled “Do Weak Local Institutions Invite Federal Attention? Prospects for Education Reform” (2011, forthcoming).
Poulomi Chakrabarti
Poulomi_Chakrabarti@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Poulomi is a second year graduate student in the field of comparative politics. She grew up in different parts of North India, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and Delhi. She has a masters degree in International Development from MIT and undergraduate degree in Urban Planning from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Her previous experience as a researcher/development practitioner led her to carry fieldwork in a number of places and settings - among lake-dwellers in Kashmir, a start-up company in rural Lesotho, within science labs at MIT, slums settlements in Delhi and the Philippines, and middle-class associations and local politicians in India. Before joining the PhD program, Poulomi worked on issues related to decentralization and local governance at the World Bank in Washington DC. She has also consulted for the Center for Policy Research and Tata Energy Research Institute in India. Her research interests include political economy of development, identity politics, local governance, behavioral economics and mixed-methods. She is particularly interested in exploring the relationship between identity politics and development outcomes through field-based experiments.
Lachen Chernyha
Lachen_Chernyha@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Lachen Chernyha is a third year graduate student from Connecticut. She has a B.A. in Political Science and International and Global Studies and an M.A. in Political Science from Brandeis University. Her primary field is Comparative Politics, with a focus on ethnic conflict and identity politics. The majority of her research has centered on Spain, particularly the Basque Country and Catalonia. Lachen's secondary field is International Relations.
Nick Coburn-Palo
Nicholas_Coburn-Palo@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Nick Coburn-Palo is fourth year Ph.D. candidate, most recently hailing from California, where he served as a high school teacher and coach for almost a decade at the College Preparatory School (CPS) in Oakland. He also serves as the Program Coordinator and Lead Instructor for the Ivy Scholars Program, a project administered by the International Security Studies program at Yale University. Previous appointments have included full time Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Weber State University (UT), Assistant Dean at Hopkins High School (MN), and Teacher and Coach at the Pinewood School (CA). In addition to having won and coached multiple national champions in public speaking and debate, Mr. Coburn-Palo has been actively involved in speech communication consulting for many years; he has trained diplomats at the United Nations for UNITAR on multilateral negotiation strategies, as well as having taught trade officials abroad in immersion programs for the Interior Ministry of the South Korean government. His eclectic research interests include the politics of representation and identity politics, U.S. national security policy in northeast Asia, American political development and the relationship between sports, celebrity, and electoral politics.
Mehtab Dere
Mehtab_Dere@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Mehtab is a first year graduate 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.
Diego Diaz
Diego Diaz@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Diego is a second year graduate student from Santiago, Chile. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Prior to initiation of his PhD studies, Diego worked as a regional consultant for UNDP in the project "Pluralizing and Extending a Network of Actors for Citizens' Democracy in Latin America." Currently, he is a Fulbright scholar and holds a fellowship from the Chilean government. His main field is comparative politics, focusing on Latin America. Particularly, he is interested in the determinants of programmatic and non-programmatic institutionalization of democracy in Latin America, as well as the different forms that party system institutionalization can take -programmatic, non-programmatic, and the several combinations in-between- and how this is affected by diverse political and economic variables.
Michael Dickerson
Michael_Dickerson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Michael is a first year graduate student from St. Louis, Missouri. He has a B.A. in economics and an M.A. in international affairs, both from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining the program, he spent three years in New Delhi where his research was supported by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, AECID, and the World Bank Institute. Michael has a strong interest in inequality, education, and policy, particularly in South Asia.
Angelica Duran Martinez
Angelica_Duranmartinez@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Angelica Duran is a fifth 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 and is funded by the United States Institute of Peace and the Social Science Research Council. She has coauthored "Does illegality breed violence?: Drug trafficking and state-sponsored protection rackets" with Richard Snyder in Crime, Law and Social Change (2009) and “The politics of drugs and illicit trade in the Americas” with Peter Andreas, forthcoming in Kingstone and Yashar, eds., Handbook of Latin American Politics, Routledge 2011.
Patrick Endress
Patrick_Endress@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Patrick Endress is a first year graduate student from New Hartford, NY. He has a B.A. in History and Government from Cornell University. Patrick’s research interests are in international relations, political economy, and alternative energies and security dynamics. Before coming to Brown, Patrick worked for five years in the national security arena on programs of national interest, domestic counterterrorism policy and planning, and the growing role of law enforcement in irregular warfare.
Emily Farris
Emily_Farris@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Emily Farris is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate 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 leadership behavior of Latino local elected officials throughout the United States.
Matthew Hodgetts
Matthew_Hodgetts@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew Hodgetts is a first year graduate student from Kingston, Ontario. He holds a B.A. (Hons.) in philosophy and political studies from Queen’s University, and a M.A. in political science from McGill University. His research interests are in normative political theory and international relations, specifically in various topics related to global justice, and in how normative theories are deployed by political actors.
Jennie Ikuta
Jennie_Ikuta@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jennie Ikuta is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate 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.
Colin Johnson
Colin_Johnson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Colin is a second year graduate student from Aledo, Texas. He received his B.A. in International Studies from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His primary field is Comparative Politics, and he focuses on social politics within the former USSR. His research interests include how the effects of demographic decline and urbanization influence social policies, such as education and immigration.
Krystle Veda Kaul
Krystle_Kaul@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Krystle is a first year graduate student from New York. She earned her B.A. in International Studies from American University’s School of International Service, and her M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where she focused on Conflict Management. Krystle has researched issues concerning conflict and nation-building in both South Asia and the Middle East having worked with a variety of international think tanks, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Middle East Center in Beirut. Krystle has also worked heavily on women’s empowerment in the Middle East working for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Jordan. Most recently, Krystle was at Chemonics International, a development consulting firm, working under contract to USAID. She was also an Adjunct Professor of Hindi and Urdu at D.C. International’s Middle East and South Asia Language Institute. Krystle’s primary fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Her research interests include, women’s rights, insurgency, ethnic conflict, and water dispute in both Kashmir and Palestine.
Pellumb Kelmendi
Pellumb_Kelmendi@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Pellumb is a second year graduate student from Prishtina, Kosovo. He has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and an M.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. Pellumb focuses on Comparative Politics and International Relations. His research interests include ethnic conflict, state-building and the political economy of post-conflict reconstruction.
Daniel Kushner
Daniel_Kushner@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Daniel Kushner is a second year graduate student in International Relations.
Anthony Lopez
Anthony_Lopez@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Anthony C. Lopez is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate studying international relations and political psychology. 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. His research seeks to incorporate evolutionary psychology into dynamic models of political behavior. Currently, he is investigating war as the product of an evolved coalitional psychology, as well as examining the relationship between inter-group conflict and intra-group cooperation from an adaptationist perspective. Anthony also maintains a blog that catalogues and discusses current research in these areas: evolutionary-politics.blogspot.com
Minh Ly
Minh_Ly@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Minh Ly is a fourth year Ph.D candidate. Before coming to Brown, Ly earned his A.B. in social studies from Harvard University, and worked at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research in political theory focuses on global justice, democratic theory, deliberative democracy, global governance institutions, and the justice of international finance. His article, "Special Drawing Rights, the Dollar, and the Institutionalist Approach to Reserve Currency Status" is forthcoming in the Review of International Political Economy, and he has been invited to contribute to the Routledge Handbook of Global Economic Governance (eds. Catherine Weaver and Manuela Moschella). He is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Global Deliberation: A Human Right to Deliberative Democracy” (Corey Brettschneider, chair; Mark Blyth; Sharon Krause; John Tomasi; and Dennis F. Thompson). The dissertation observes that, according to liberal political theory, the state must publicly justify its coercion of citizens. But there is a puzzle: the state is not limited to coercing its own citizens. It can also coerce non-citizens internationally, either by acting alone or by working with other states in global governance institutions. Do states have a duty to publicly justify their coercion of non-citizens? The dissertation argues that they do have a duty of public justification. The dissertation explains how deliberative public justification can make states and global governance institutions like the UN Security Council, World Bank, and IMF more accountable, legitimate, and respectful of human rights in their international acts.
Matthew J. Lyddon
Matthew_Lyddon@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew J. Lyddon is a third year PhD candidate from Wales, United Kingdom. Matt has a B.A. with First Class Honors in Politics, Social Philosophy and Applied Ethics, and an M.A. with Distinction in Ethics and Social Philosophy, both from Cardiff University. Matt's primary field is political theory; his interests encompass contemporary forms of political liberalism, the political function of education, political ethics and the intersection of democratic theory and constitutional law. His current focus is on discussions about the influence of liberal political values and practices on citizens' wider beliefs and value systems, and the role of both within liberal political conceptions of democratic citizenship. Matt also has interests in American political thought, the role of the judiciary in democratic societies, British politics and the history and development of the British liberal tradition. Prior to joining the political science department at Brown, Matt took a break from academia during which he established a successful career in higher education marketing and student recruitment at Cardiff. He also co-authored 'The Long Journey' (Kestrel Books, 2005, with Anthony Cutler), an educational resource for students aged 16-18, exploring the development of democracy in Britain via the history of voting rights in the UK.
Nazar Mammedov
Nazar_Mammedov@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Nazar Mammedov is a second year graduate student from Turkmenistan. Nazar has a B.Sc. from Middle East Technical University and a MA in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University. His fields are comparative politics and international relations. He is interested in the interethnic relations, minority rights, and nation-building in post-Soviet Central Asia.
Kevin McGravey
Kevin_McGravey@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Kevin J. McGravey is a first year graduate student in political theory. He holds a B.A. in Religion from Haverford College and an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School. Kevin’s interests include democratic theory, public reason, the history of political thought, ethics and the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and politics.
David McMillan
David_McMillan@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
David McMillan is an eighth year PhD candidate in American Politics.
Domingo Morel
Domingo_Morel@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Domingo Morel is a third year PhD candidate 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.
James Newburg
James_Newburg@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
James Newburg is a first-year graduate student in American politics. He received his B.A. in political science from San Francisco State University and his A.A. in liberal studies from De Anza College. His research combines interests in voting behavior, racial and ethnic politics, and political geography. He also studies public opinion and political psychology. While completing his undergraduate studies, he was a data analyst for Team In Training, a fundraising campaign of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. James is from San Francisco, California.
Feryaz Ocakli
Feryaz_Ocakli@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Feryaz Ocakli is a eighth year Ph.D. candidate from Kocaeli, Turkey. He has an M.A. from Brown University (2006), and a B.Sc. with high honors from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey (2004). He is currently completing his dissertation entitled: “Electing the Pious: Islamist Politics and Local Party Strategies in Turkey.” His research interests include Democracy and Islam, Comparative Political Economy of Development, Islamist and Ethnic Party Politics, and Local Party Strategies and Coalition Building. Feryaz’s dissertation analyzes how Islamist parties mobilize new constituencies after they join elections. His research identifies the variation in the sub-national electoral performance of Islamist parties, and analyzes the causes of this variation through a quasi-experimental research design which systematically compares within-case and cross-case variation in local elite recruitment and intraparty politics of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. His main finding is that Islamist politics at the local level is a product of ongoing pragmatic calculations of Islamist political actors and the competition over resources and status among newly recruited local elites – factors overlooked in the literature. Feryaz conducted a yearlong field research in eight different cities in Turkey, where he interviewed Islamist, Kurdish and mainstream Turkish politicians, civil society activists, and local bureaucrats. He also examined local newspapers and engaged in participant observation by joining Islamist campaign trails for municipal elections. His research was funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Brown University’s Graduate Program in Development.
Andrea Owens-Jones
Andrea_Owens-Jones@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Andrea Owens-Jones is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Americus, Georgia. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Mercer University and a M.A. in Political Science from Georgia State University. Her main research interests are urban politics and policy; race and politics; and critical race theory. Andrea’s dissertation examines the way African-Americans obtain and employ land use power at the neighborhood level in cities, using Atlanta, GA as a case study.
Bala Posani
Balamuralidhar_Posani@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Bala is a first year graduate student in Comparative Politics. He is originally from Hyderabad, India, and has lived and studied/worked in Hyderabad, Delhi and most recently, in London and Oxford. Before Brown, he read Contemporary India at Oxford, and Development at London School of Economics, and (in a previous incarnation), Computer Engineering at Osmania University in India. Between LSE and Oxford, he was Senior Research Analyst at Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, where he researched and published on issues related to accountability in government and public service delivery in India. Bala's research interests include identity politics in India, public institutions and state capacity, service delivery and citizenship, and political economy of development.
Kaitlin Sidorsky
Kaitlin_Sidorsky@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Kaitlin Sidorsky is a second year graduate student from Rocky Point, New York. She received her BA in Politics and Law from Bryant University. Her primary field is American Politics with a secondary field in Comparative Politics. She plans on specializing in gender studies specifically the political role of the first lady and her counterparts in other nations. More broadly she is interested in executive authority structures in relation to gender studies both within an American and comparative context.
Fiorella Jazmin Sierra
Fiorella_Sierra@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jazmin Sierra is a third year student from Argentina, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. She has a B.A. in International Studies from Torcuato Di Tella University. Jazmin's research interests are centered on the political economy of development, particularly state-business relations, industrial policy and national oil companies. Her current work focuses on multinationals from emerging countries. Last summer she received a grant from Brown's Graduate Program in Development to conduct fieldwork in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on Brazilian multinationals.
Heather Silber Mohamed
Heather_Silber@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Heather Silber Mohamed is a fifth 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 dissertation, “Becoming Latino-American: Immigration, Socialization, and Latino Political Identity,” studies the relationship between politics, protest, and identity. Using the 2006 immigration protests as a case study, Heather’s research explores the ways in which the immigration policy debate affects self-identification among different subgroups of the Latino population. Heather employs a combination of quantitative methods, content analysis, and geographic methods. She finds that individuals interviewed after the immigration protests are more likely to self-identify as American than comparable respondents interviewed before these events. Highlighting the diversity within the U.S. Latino population, Heather also studies gendered and national origin differences in identity and political socialization. Heather spent two years as a Dissertation Fellow at Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and has received a number of competitive awards, including the John A. Garcia Scholarship for advanced methods training, awarded by APSA’s Political Methodology Section, and the Best Paper Award from the Latino Caucus of the Midwest Political Science Association (2010). Before coming to Brown, Heather worked for six years in the U.S. Congress, including three years for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA).
Jason Swadley
Jason_Swadley@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jason Swadley is a third year PhD candidate 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. http://jasonswadley.com
Christopher Tallent
Christopher_Tallent@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Chris Tallent is a fifth year PhD candidate 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 third year graduate student from New York interested in comparative politics. She received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and her M.A. from Leiden University in The Netherlands. As both an undergraduate and a graduate student at Leiden, her focus was primarily in political theory, specifically on multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. Now her research interests primarily revolve around the interaction between inequality, ethnic conflict, and democratic consolidation in the case of Nigeria. She is interested in the ways in which frustrations with an incompetent and ineffective democratic regime combined with stagnant economic development can reinforce ethnic and religious identification, as ethno-religious organizations provide basic services, such as security, justice, and access to educational and health services, to the local population. She also seeks to explore how civic associations which are primarily ethnic-based and explicitly seek to promote the exclusive interests of an ethnic group can undermine, as opposed to support the further consolidation of, democratic political institutions. She is also interested in the ways in which broad-based economic development can possibly lead to the growth of inter-ethnic civic networks, which have the potential to not only further embed and expand democratic norms, but also to alleviate ethnic conflict and violence in society. In short, Megan seeks to understand the complex ways in which development, democracy, ethnic conflict, and inequality are inextricably intertwined with one another.
Aaron Weinstein
Aaron_Q_Weinstein@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Aaron Weinstein is a second year graduate student from Nashua, NH. He received his B.A. from Cornell University, graduating with Magna cum laude honors in Government as well as the Esman prize for best senior honors thesis. After his senior year, he enrolled in the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) - where he did one year of masters work focusing on religion and ethics in public policy - before coming to Brown. His area of interest is the intersection of American politics and faith, especially: the American civil religion, atheism in the public sphere, and the repercussions of religious pluralism in a liberal democracy.
Liza Williams
Liza_Williams@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Liza Williams is a second year graduate student from Maine. She holds an M.A. in Political Science from Columbia University and graduated from Dartmouth College where she earned her A.B. in History and Government. She's concentrating in the field of political theory. Her main research interests are legal philosophy, modern democratic theory and constitutionalism. Prior to Brown, Liza taught American history and world history to high school students for several years. She has also worked as a research assistant at an international NGO on topics relating to Asian regional affairs and the development of democratic institutions abroad. Liza enjoys running and cycling.
Meghan Wilson
Meghan_Wilson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Meghan Wilson is a first year graduate student in American Politics.
VISITING GRADUATE STUDENTS
Ling Chen
Ling_Chen@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Ling Chen is a sixth year PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting fellow at Brown University. Her research interests focus on comparative and international political economy, especially the political economy of China and East Asia. She has published articles in Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, and The China Journal. Her dissertation focuses on the politics of industrial upgrading in China, especially how global capital interacted with domestic political and economic institutions in affecting the incentives and behavior of local firms. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council (Andrew Mellon Foundation), the William Reinsch Fellowship, and the Nicole Suveges Fellowship, among other grants. She also teaches in the department of political science at the University of Rhode Island.
Alexander Korolev
Alexander_Korolev@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Alexander Korolev is a visiting graduate student from China in Comparative Politics.
Feng Wu
Feng_Wu@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Wu Feng (Harry Wu in English) is a visiting graduate student from China. He is pursuing his Ph.D in international relations at Beijing Foreign Studies University. While at Brown, he will continue his research on the rise of constructivism in American and Chinese international relations theory and on issues of interpretation in translating English international relations texts into Chinese.