The Graduate Program
Carla Alberti
Carla_Alberti@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Carla is a fourth 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.
Catalina Arreaza
Catalina_Arreaza@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Catalina Arreaza is a first year student from Bogotá, Colombia, interested in International Relations and Comparative Politics in Latin America. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and a M.A. in International Affairs from New School University, New York. Before being awarded with a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her M.A degree, Catalina served as a Human Rights Consultant for the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has also worked on several research projects with distinct faculty members of Universidad de los Andes. Prior to starting her Ph.D at Brown, she worked as coordinator for Universidad de los Andes' Center for International Studies. Her most recent publications include two co- authored book chapters, focusing on the nexus between violent non-state actors and drug-trafficking in Colombia (with A.B. Tickner and D. García, 2011), and on the role played by international actors in peacebuilding initiatives in Colombia (with A.C. Mason, 2012).
Michal Ben Noah
Michal_Ben_Noah@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Michal is a first year graduate student in political theory. She has a BA in PPE (Politics, Philosophy & Economics) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Michal's main research interests are anarchism and questions of state authority; feminist theory, in particular issues of prostitution and pornography; just war theory and pacifist theory; and the concepts of radicalism, heirarchy and impartiality.
Maria Angelica Bautista
Maria_Bautista@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Maria Angelica Bautista is a sixth 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.
Elizabeth Bennett
Elizabeth_Bennett@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Elizabeth Bennett is a fifth year PhD candidate in international relations and comparative politics. She studies voluntary, ethical certifications as a form of private global governance. Her dissertation examines the governance structure of Fairtrade International, the INGO that manages the Fairtrade label, focusing on the inclusion/exclusion of the producers of Fairtrade products, and the balance of power between North and South. This research is published in The Practices and Processes of Fair Trade (Routledge), Patterns in Social Entrepreneurship Research (Edward Elgar), and the peer-reviewed journal Globalizations. It is supported by the American Council on Germany, the German Academic Exchange, the Tinker Foundation, and the Watson Institute for International Studies. Elizabeth is also a 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 inequality, ethical certifications, and civic engagement. Before coming to Brown, Elizabeth earned a MALD in political economy and international development at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, interned at USAID in Washington DC, taught public high school in NYC, worked for a Mexican NGO, and taught at Tufts University.
Puneet Bhasin
Puneet_Bhasin@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Puneet Bhasin is a second 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 fifth year PhD candidate from Albany, NY – originally from Babruysk, Belarus. She is specializing in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Yelena earned an M.A. in Regional Studies at Harvard University in 2006, and a B.A. magna cum laude with Honors in International Relations at Wellesley College. Her authored research has appeared in Political Science Quarterly and Problems of Post-Communism, for which she earned the 2011 Millar Prize. Her previous awards include the Fulbright Fellowship, National Science Foundation Award for the Integration of Research and Education, and a recent FLAS grant to study Urdu at the South Asia Summer Language Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Yelena’s dissertation, supported by the USIP Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar Fellowship, American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Fellowship, Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Research Grant (Special Recognition - John L. Stanley Award), compares Pakistan and India’s security repertoires, and explores the endogenous relationship between states and violent nonstate actors.
David Blanding
David_Blanding@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
David Blanding is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate from The Bronx, New York. Broadly, David’s research and teaching interests lie in the areas of public opinion, public policy, race politics, and the American presidency. His research has appeared in the Harvard Educational Reviewand State Politics and Policy Quarterlyand he is currently completing his dissertation, which examines the role of public opinion in civil rights change. David holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University and an A.M. in Political Science from Brown.
Kelly Branham
Kelly_Branham@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Kelly Branham is a first year graduate student from Orlando, Florida. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Providence College graduating with Summa Cum Laude honors. Her primary field is American Politics with more specific interests in policy. She hopes to focus her research on education policy and the role of education in democracy.
Daniel Carrigg
Daniel_Carrigg@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Daniel T. Carrigg is a first year graduate student in American Politics. He earned a B.A. in German and both B.A. and M.A. degrees in Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. Prior to attending Brown, Dan worked as a public servant in the State of Rhode Island, where he was Deputy Director at the Office of Attorney General, Chief of Program Development at the Office of Energy Resources, and Project Administrator at the NSF-funded Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. His interest is in public policy and consistency across multiple levels of the American system of federalism.
Jennifer Cassidy
Jennifer_Cassidy@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jennifer Caitlin Cassidy is a fourth 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 third year graduate student in comparative politics. Her research interests include political economy of development, identity politics, public service delivery and local governance with a regional focus on South Asia. Her dissertation project explores the determinants of sub-national variation in development in India. Towards this end, she is interested in how different political-economic regimes came to be constructed in post-independent India. Poulomi has a masters degree in international development from MIT and undergraduate degree in urban planning from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. Before coming to Brown, she worked on issues related to decentralization and local governance at the World Bank in Washington DC.
Lachen Chernyha
Lachen_Chernyha@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Lachen Chernyha is a fourth 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 fifth 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.
Diego Diaz
Diego Diaz@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Diego is a third year Ph.D. candidate 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 second 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 sixth 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, state power, and violence. Her dissertation project explores variations in drug related violence in Colombia and Mexico and is funded by the United States Institute of Peace, the Social Science Research Council and the Open Society Foundation. She has published "Presidents, Parties and Referenda in Latin America" in Comparative Political Studies (2012) and 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, in Kingstone and Yashar, eds., Handbook of Latin American Politics, Routledge (2012).
Patrick Endress
Patrick_Endress@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Patrick Endress is a second 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 sixth 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.
Oddny Helgadottir
Oddny_Helgadottir@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Oddný is a first year graduate student in International Relations and Comparative Politics. She is primarily interested in international political economy, financial and economic policy, financial crises and economic ideas. Oddný is from Iceland and first came to Brown on a Fulbright scholarship to complete a Master's in Public Policy. She has a B.F.A. from the Icelandic Academy for the Arts and worked as a print and broadcast journalist and independent writer and filmmaker in Iceland before coming to the United States.
Matthew Hodgetts
Matthew_Hodgetts@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew Hodgetts is a second 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 fifth 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. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the relationship between politics and ethics, or the relationship between our collective commitments and conceptions of what it means to be fully human. She is currently writing a dissertation that employs the political and philosophical thought of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche as interpretive lenses by which to investigate how our democratic commitments inform and complicate our conceptions of human flourishing. Other research interests include religion and politics, agency, virtue, Aristotle, Augustine, and Arendt.
Colin Johnson
Colin_Johnson@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Colin is a third year Ph.D. candidate 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.
Rajeev Kadambi
Rajeev_Kadambi@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Rajeev is a first year graduate student in Political Theory from Bengaluru, India. His main research interests are in modern political thought, democratic theory, and constitutionalism. He is keen to evolve theoretical questions in the field of democratic and constitutional theory within the intellectual frames of developing countries. Rajeev has a BA. LL.B. from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, and a LL.M. from Boston College Law School. After spending 3 years as a trial and appellate lawyer with Dua Associates, he taught at O.P. Jindal Global University, Christ University, and National Law School of India University. As an Assistant Professor at the Jindal Global Law School he offered courses in Indian Constitutional Law and Comparative Constitutional Law. He has been a research fellow at Azim Premji University; Center for Disability Studies, NALSAR; and Boston College Law School, working on wide-ranging issues in legal reform for persons with disability, and law and governance. His academic essays and reviews have appeared in Indian Journal of Constitutional Law, George Washington International Law Review, NUJS Law Review, Emory International Law Review, Political Studies Review, Juris Scientia, and Education and Law Journal. His current work-in-progress studies the relationship between democracy and the market by tracing the legal discourse around the idea of the state as a trustee on behalf of its people.
Krystle Veda Kaul
Krystle_Kaul@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Krystle is a second 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 third 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 third year Ph.D. candidate whose research interests include better understanding of the nature and impact of the Indian political process. He completed a BA in History from Johns Hopkins University and grew up in Monsey, NY.
Minh Ly
Minh_Ly@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Minh Ly is a fifth 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, and global governance institutions. 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). It argues that a distinctive form of deliberation, called "deliberative public justification," can make states and global governance institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and UN Security Council more democratically accountable for respecting human rights. Deliberative public justification gives affected persons the right to critically question and call into account institutional leaders who are responsible for policies that can violate human rights. As part of his work on global governance institutions and international political economy, he has published an article, "Special Drawing Rights, the Dollar, and the Institutionalist Approach to Reserve Currency Status" in the Review of International Political Economy 19:2 (2012): 341-362, and he has been invited to contribute a chapter to the Routledge Handbook of Global Economic Governance (eds. Catherine Weaver and Manuela Moschella).
Matthew J. Lyddon
Matthew_Lyddon@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew J. Lyddon is a fourth 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 third 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.
Michael Marcusa
Michael_Marcusa@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Michael Marcusa is a first year graduate student specializing in Comparative Politics. He holds a B.A with Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors in Government and Middle Eastern Studies from Dartmouth College and was awarded the Rockefeller Prize for the best senior honors thesis in the field of Comparative Politics. Michael's research agenda seeks to study the complex inter-play between tangible state institutions and ideational variables like identity, ideology, and culture. He is undertaking these scholarly efforts with particular reference to political development issues in the Arab World. A proficient speaker and reader of Arabic, Michael has lived and travelled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. Before coming to Brown, he spent seven months studying Arabic literary and social theoretic texts in Cairo, Egypt as a Dartmouth Paul L. and Neil T. McGorrian Fellow.
Kevin McGravey
Kevin_McGravey@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Kevin J. McGravey is a second 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.
Domingo Morel
Domingo_Morel@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Domingo Morel is a fourth year PhD candidate from Providence, RI. His research interests are in the fields of American politics and political theory with a focus on race and ethnic, urban and education politics. His dissertation, “Breaking or Making Citizens?: Centralization and Its Effect on Democratic Participation,” examines how state takeovers of local school districts affect political participation among racial minorities. Domingo is co-founder and co-chair of the Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University and previously served as an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Rhode Island. He received his B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Rhode Island and an M.A. in Counseling from Rhode Island College.
James Newburg
James_Newburg@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
James Newburg is a second 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 agenda focuses on how social and geographic context influences intergroup attitudes in American politics, and, in turn, how such attitudes affect political behavior. This research combines interests in political psychology, social identity group politics, political geography, voting behavior, and public opinion. He researches similar issues in comparative politics as a secondary field of study. 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.
Andrea Owens-Jones
Andrea_Owens-Jones@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Andrea Owens-Jones is a seventh 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 second 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 third year Ph.D. candidate 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.
Jazmin Sierra
Jazmin_Sierra@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jazmin Sierra is a fourth year student from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has a B.A. in International Studies from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Jazmin's research agenda is centered on comparative and international political economy. Her interests include state-business relations, oil politics and rising powers. Jazmin’s dissertation explores the emergence of multinationals from developing countries and is funded by the Social Science Research Council. During 2012-2013 she will be conducting fieldwork in México, D. F, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Jason Swadley
Jason_Swadley@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Jason Swadley is a fourth 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 sixth 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 fourth 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.
Marcus Walton
Marcus_Walton@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Marcus Walton is a first year graduate student from Danbury, Connecticut studying comparative politics. Has has a B.A. in Islamic and Near Eastern Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to Brown, he spent two years living in Cairo, Egypt, the first of which was through the Fulbright Program. As part of his grant he taught at Al-Azhar University and subsequently stayed to work in the NGO field of international development in the Middle East. His interests include political economy, social welfare reform, and post-revolutionary politics in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Aaron Weinstein
Aaron_Q_Weinstein@Brown.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Aaron Weinstein is a third year Ph.D. candidate 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 third year Ph.D. candidate 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 second year graduate student from Detroit, Michigan. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Spelman College where she studied education policy and urban school reform. Meghan's research interests include race, education policy and political power. Meghan has worked for the City of Detroit, where she helped facilitate the transition in government from one administration to the next. She has also worked as a consultant for Detroit Public Schools. As a consultant, she started the Student Summer Work Program (SSWP) and acted as a liaison between The Bond and Detroit Public Schools. She is currently writing on racial dependency, minority rights, and citizenship with a broad focus on institutional barriers to political power. Meghan looks to bridge the gap between academia and real politics by helping people realize their constitutional political power.