Thursday, November 14, 2019
12:00 to 1:00 pm
The Faculty Club
Biography
Wendy Schiller is Professor of Political Science, International & Public Affairs, and Chair, Department of Political Science at Brown University. She did her undergraduate work in political science at the University of Chicago, served on the staffs of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Mario Cuomo, and then obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. After Fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University, she came to Brown University in 1994. She teaches popular courses titled The American Presidency, Introduction to the American Political Process, and Congress and Public Policy at Brown University. Among books she has authored or co-authored are Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment (Princeton University Press), Gateways to Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Cengage), The Contemporary Congress (Rowman Littlefield) and Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations (Princeton University Press). She has also published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, and the Journal of Politics. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg News, and she provides political commentary to The Guardian, Providence Journal, WPRO radio, RIPBS A Lively Experiment, and WJAR10, the local NBC affiliate in Providence.
In this talk, Professor Schiller will talk about her current research on gender inequality and federalism with a focus on human security against domestic violence. Women tend to be the majority of victims of domestic violence around the country, but there were no laws concerning domestic violence until the late 1970s at the state level, and it was not until 1994 that the first major federal law was passed specifically focused on addressing violence against women. Today, our system of state governments produces a lot of variation in laws concerning domestic violence and there is variation in how those laws are implemented. That means a woman living in one state might be much safer from domestic violence than a woman living in a neighboring state. Overall, this work shows that the lack of uniformity in the implementation of domestic violence policy creates inequality in the criminal justice system’s treatment of domestic violence, and makes personal security for women contingent on where they live.