Meet the Fellows

Ariel David Adesnik - History, Oxford University

Project: The Rebirth of American Democracy Promotion: Carter and Reagan in Central America

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia

David Adesnik is Policy Director at the Foreign Policy Initiative.

He focuses on defense and strategy issues. Previously, Adesnik was a visiting fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. For two years, he served as deputy director for Joint Data Support at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he focused on the modeling and simulation of irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. Adesnik also spent several years as research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. In that capacity, he spent several months in Baghdad as an operations research and systems analyst for Multinational Corps–Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2008, he was part of the foreign policy and national security staff for John McCain’s presidential campaign. 

Adesnik's academic interests include the impact of rhetoric on foreign policy, democracy promotion, and Latin America. He received his Ph.D. and Masters of Philosophy from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His dissertation focused on the Reagan administration’s approach to democracy promotion. David received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia. His work has been published in Foreign Policy, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Quarterly, Forbes.com, FoxNews.com and The Daily Caller. David has served as a commentator on several cable television networks and radio programs.

Selected Recent Publications

"The Logic of American Exceptionalism." The Journal of International Security Affairs, no. 26 (Spring/Summer 2014).

"Rand Paul Sees No Threat From Terrorist Safe Havens In Iraq." Forbes, June 20, 2014.

"O’s Counterterrorism Fund." National Review Online, June 4, 2014.

Gwendoline Alphonso - Government, Cornell University

Project: Progressive & Traditional Family Orders: Parties, Ideologies, and the Development of Social Policy across the 20th Century

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Adam Sheingate, Johns Hopkins University

Gwendoline M. Alphonso is Assistant Professor of Politics at Fairfield University.

Alphonso is interested in the study of state-society relations, particularly the intersection of culture and morality with law and political development. Her primary research interests are two-fold: first those pertaining to American Politics: United States Congress, Political Parties, American Political Development, Gender and Politics, Politics of the Family, Social Policy; and second those relating to Law: Feminist Legal Theory, Family Law, Comparative Constitutional Law and Theories of Criminal Law and Punishment.

Alphonso's dissertation examined the origins and evolution of partisan family ideology and its effect on social policy through three periods in 20th century American political history – the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the postwar Period (1946–1960), and the Contemporary period (1980–2005). The overarching contention is that the family has been a central organizing principle of political development and the historical development of American social policy, a claim that has been largely overlooked in political and policy analysis. Through extensive inductive analysis of party platforms, congressional hearings, family bill sponsorship/co-sponsorship and roll call data in the House and Senate, she identified patterns in the development of partisan family ideologies, contending that there have been two competing family ideologies – the progressive and traditional – that have persisted across the past century. She explored the two family ideologies as part of broader family political orders, defined as "constellations of ideas, policies, institutions, and practices regarding the family that hang together and exhibit a coherence and predictability." The dissertation documented and explained the change and evolution of the progressive and traditional family orders, their partisan composition and attendant social policies. By inserting social policies into evolving family orders and unearthing elite interests, partisan dynamics, electoral family conditions, and family ideologies, the project hoped to account for why certain types of policy ideas, such as same-sex marriage, gain ascendance during certain periods while others decline.

Selected Recent Publications

"Resurgent Parenthood – Organic Domestic Ideals & the Southern Family Roots of Conservative Ascendancy, 1980-2005.” Polity 48 (2016): 205-223. 

"From Need to Hope: The American Family & Poverty in Partisan Discourse." Journal of Policy History 27, no. 4 (Autumn 2015): 592-635.

“Public & Private Order: Law, Race, Morality and the Antebellum Courts of Louisiana, 1830-1860.”  Journal of Southern Legal History 23 (2015): 117-160. 

“Of Families or Individuals?Southern Child Workers & the Progressive Crusade for Child Labor Regulation, 1899-1920.” in James Marten (ed). Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Period (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Clara Altman - History, Brandeis University

Project: Courtroom Colonialism: Philippine Law and U.S. Rule, 1898-1935

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: Mary Dudziak, Emory University

Clara Altman is the Director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center.

In that capacity, she works to promote the preservation of the history of the federal courts and the federal judiciary in a variety of ways.  In particular, the Federal Judicial History Office develops programs relating to the history of the judicial branch and assists federal courts with their own judicial history programs.

Altman earned a B.A. in History and Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis, a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School, and a Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University.  She was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.  Her scholarly work concerns legal history and the U.S. in the world with a focus on U.S. engagement with foreign legal cultures and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Her dissertation, “Courtroom Colonialism: Philippine Law and U.S. Rule, 1898-1935” is a historical account of the development of the Philippine legal system under U.S. rule between the occupation of the islands and the start of the Philippine Commonwealth.  The project was based in archival research in English and Spanish language sources in the Philippines and the United States and was supported by grants from the American Historical Association, Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, and the Mellon Foundation, in addition to the Miller Center. Altman has also written on the state of the field of legal history.  In her chapter, “The International Context: An Imperial Perspective on American Legal History,” in A Companion to American Legal History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) Altman proposes a new, global framework for the field, emanating from three categories of analysis: the constitutional order, the international order, and what some scholars have called “legal borderlands."

Saladin Ambar - Political Science, Rutgers University

Project: The Rise of the Hudson Progressives: How Governors Helped Shape the Modern Presidency

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia

Saladin Ambar is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University.

He teaches courses in American politics on the American presidency and governorship, race and American political development, and political parties and elections. Professor Ambar is the author of How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) which won the Robert C. and Virginia L. Williamson Prize in the Social Sciences, and the newly released Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era (Oxford University Press, 2014).  He is currently working on a book about the political career and thought of former New York Governor, Mario M. Cuomo. Since his arrival in 2009, Professor Ambar has been active in Lehigh's Africana Studies program where he has taught courses in Black Political Thought, along with a First Year Seminar on the Political Philosophy of Barack Obama.

Ambar's dissertation explored how pre-presidential executive office and leading Progressive Era state executives built a line of practices that reinvigorated and expanded the scope of presidential action. The central case studies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt's governorships are examined against a backdrop of shifting executive practices, exemplified by such instrumental governors as Grover Cleveland, Bob LaFollette, and Hiram Johnson. This study challenged the presumption of the modern presidency's origins. It posited that the modern American presidency cannot be fully apprehended without recognition of its ties to developments launched by state executives.

Selected Recent Publications

Malcolm X at Oxford Union (Oxford University Press, 2014)

How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

“Malcolm X at the Oxford Union.” Race and Class (London, UK: April, 2012): 24-38.

Francesca Ammon - American Studies, Yale University

Project: Waging War on the Landscape: Demolition and Clearance in Postwar America

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Edmund Russell, University of Kansas

Francesca Ammon is Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Professor Ammon is an historian of the built environment. Her teaching, research, and writing focus on the changing shapes and spaces of the 20th- and 21st-century American city. She grounds her interdisciplinary approach to this subject in the premise that the landscape materializes social relations, cultural values, and economic processes. In particular, Professor Ammon is interested in the ways that visual culture informs planning and design, the dynamic relationships between cities and nature, the politics of place and space, and the roles of business and the state in shaping the physical landscape.

Professor Ammon is currently a colloquium member of the Penn/Mellon Foundation Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative. She is on the board of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History (SACRPH). Before joining the PennDesign faculty, Professor Ammon was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has also held the Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). While completing her Ph.D. in American Studies, she held a fellowship as a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities and was the John E. Rovensky Fellow with the Business History Conference.

Professor Ammon was the 2010-2011 Miller Center Ambrose Monell Foundation Fellow in Technology and Democracy.

Selected Recent Publications

“Post-Industrialization and the City of Consumption: Attempted Revitalization in Asbury Park, New Jersey.” Journal of Urban History 41. no. 2 (March 2015): 158-174.

“Unearthing Benny the Bulldozer: The Culture of Clearance in Postwar Children’s Books.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (April 2012): 306-336.

Noel Anderson - Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project: The Geopolitics of Civil War: External Military Aid, Competitive Intervention, and Duration of Intrastate Conflict

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Stathis N. Kalyvas, Yale University

While civil wars proliferated during the Cold War, their numbers have declined in the post-Cold War period. What is more, new conflicts breaking out since 1990 have much shorter average durations than their Cold War predecessors. What explains changing trends in the incidence and duration of civil war? To answer this question, Anderson’s dissertation explores how inter-state competition affects intra-state conflict. He argues that the varying prevalence of what he calls competitive interventions—two-sided, simultaneous military assistance from different third-party states to both government and rebel combatants—is central to the decline in war, and he develops a theory of competitive intervention that models and explains why this form of external military aid prolongs violent intrastate conflicts. The theory explores the micro-foundations of military aid and civil war; explains the unique strategic dilemmas competitive interventions entail for third-party interveners; and accounts for the decline in the incidence and duration of civil war by linking changes at the level of the international system to variation in the prevalence of competitive intervention over time. To test his theory, Anderson combines statistical analyses of a novel time-series dataset of military aid to civil war combatants (1975-2009) with detailed case studies, fieldwork, and archival research. His results shed new light on the international dimensions of civil war, address ongoing debates concerning the utility of military aid as a foreign policy instrument, identify which forms of intervention facilitate—and which impede—conflict management strategies, and inform policies prescriptions aimed at resolving today’s most violent conflicts.

Josh Ashenmiller - History, University of California, Santa Barbara

Project: The Strange Career of Environmental Impact Assessment

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Richard Andrews, UNC College of Arts and Sciences

Josh Ashenmiller is Professor of History at Fullerton College in California.

Ashenmiller has taught U.S. history at Fullerton College since 2006. Prior to that, he taught at Scripps College, Claremont-McKenna College, Cal State Northridge, Campbell Hall School, and River Oaks School. He has published articles in the Pacific Historical Review and various historical encyclopedias. In addition to teaching, he has worked on the Faculty Senate, Program Review Committee, and the accreditation self-study.

Ashenmiller wrote his dissertation on environmental impact assessment (EIA) and discussed a strong continuity between environmental impact assessment and the long tradition of federal attempts to manage economic growth, dating to the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887.

Nancy A. Banks - History, Columbia University

Project: The Struggle over Affirmative Action in the New York City Building Trades, 1961–1976

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

Nancy Banks is the Dean of Students at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

While much scholarly work has been devoted to federal civil rights policy in the 1960s – including several studies on the growing commitment by the civil rights movement and the federal government in that decade to Affirmative Action – Banks believed there had been scant attention paid to Affirmative Action as it relates to the building trades unions, nor to the bitter and lengthy conflicts between civil rights activists, minority workers, and union members. Drawing upon a number of sources – including government documents and court records; the correspondence of political leaders, union officials, and civil rights organizations; and personal interviews with workers, politicians, and labor activists – Banks dissertation explored how Affirmative Action conflicts played out in New York City between 1961 and 1976, and analyzed the impact that they had on the development, implementation, and evolution of the nation's union-targeted affirmative action policies.

Warren Bass - History; Journalism, Columbia University

Project: JFK and Israel: The Kennedy Administration and the Origins of the U.S.–Israel Alliance

Fellowship year: 2001

Warren Bass is Senior Editor of The Wall Street Journal review section.

Bass was formerly a fellow with the RAND Corporation, adviser to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and the nonfiction book review editor of The Washington Post. He was a staffer on the 9/11 Commission and one of the writers and editors of its report. He has a Ph.D. in history and an M.Sc. in journalism from Columbia. His book, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (Oxford, 2003), was one of the Christian Science Monitor's best books of 2013. 

Selected Recent Publications

"How the U.S. Stumbled Into the Drone Era: Before 9/11, Washington Was still Locked in Debate over a Now Familiar Weapon." Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2014. 

"Cheney vs. 9/11 Commission: What Each Said About Iraq." Washington Wire-Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2014.

Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Betsy Beasley - American Studies, Yale University

Project: “Serving the World: Energy Contracting, Logistical Labors, and the Culture of Globalization, 1945-2008”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania

Betsy A. Beasley is a Ph.D candidate in American Studies at Yale University.  Her dissertation traces the rise of Houston as a global city in the half-century following World War II, arguing that the city’s business elite, especially those in oilfield services companies including Brown & Root, Schlumberger, and Hughes Tool, imagined and enacted a new vision of globalism.  Vehemently resistant to the demands of labor unions, corporate executives positioned the U.S. not as a center of manufacturing and production but as a white-collar headquarters offering expertise in logistics, engineering, and resource management to the rest of the globe.  This project charts the material developments that established Houston as a global center of petrochemical services alongside the cultural narratives that influenced and helped make sense of social, political, and economic change. 

Whereas the most common vision of American global power in the postwar years emphasized the U.S. as an industrial producer whose commodities and high standard of living would be exported around the world, this project highlights an alternative vision based on exporting service and expertise and importing commodities and raw materials, a different globalism that would come to dominate American culture and politics in the post-industrial 1970s. Drawing methodologically from geography, cultural history, and the history of capitalism, Beasley examines a management vision of U.S. global power while also exploring the resistance of organized labor to this imperial project and the attempts of executives to convince global oil consumers to support U.S. expertise as the best means to ensure access to inexpensive petroleum.   

Beasley holds a B.A. in history from the University of Georgia and an M.S. in Urban Affairs from Hunter College of the City University of New York.  Her work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the New Orleans Center for the Global South at Tulane University, and the Coca-Cola World Fund. She co-hosts and produces "Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast" with David Stein.

Selected Recent Publications

“Fighting for a Radical City: Student Protesters and the Politics of Space in 1960s and 1970s Downtown Manhattan.” Urban History Review 37, no. 2 (March 2009)

“Another New Kind of Marriage.” Public Seminar,  July 20, 2015.

Michael Beckley - Political Science, Columbia University

Project: The Unipolar Era

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Robert Ross, Boston College

Michael Beckley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University.

Beckley's research focuses on national power (how to measure it and why some countries are more powerful than others) and has been featured in numerous academic journals and popular media including NPR, TheWashington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and Harvard Business Review. Prior to Tufts, Michael was a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and at Dartmouth College and worked at the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Titled “The Unipolar Era,” Beckley’s dissertation set out to debunk the notion that the United States was being eclipsed by China as the dominant power. In particular, he aimed to demonstrate that GNP alone does not determine the strength of a nation’s military. Instead, he argued the level and comprehensive integration of a state’s economic development matter most. Beckley won the article of the year award (2010) from the Journal of Strategic Studies and in 2009 received the International Studies Association’s Carl Beck Award for best paper by a graduate student.

Selected Recent Publications

"The Myth of Entangling Alliances: Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts." International Security 39, no. 4 (2015): 7-48.

"The Myth of Entangling Alliances." War on the Rocks, June 9, 2015.

"How Big a Competitive Threat Is China, Really?" Harvard Business Review, February 29, 2012.

“China and Pakistan: Fair-Weather Friends.” Yale Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (Winter 2012).

Sean Beienburg - Politics, Princeton University

Project: Constitutional Resistance in the States, 1880–2010

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: John Dinan, Wake Forest College

Sean Beienburg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University.

Beienburg's teaching and research interests include the U.S. Constitution and constitutional law, American political development and thought, federalism, parties and interest groups, and Prohibition.

His dissertation examined how states’ rights claims and efforts to evade, ignore, and resist federal constitutional development played an increasingly central role in the political climate. He questioned whether such state activity was a normal part of American political development or a dangerous aberration recalling the divisions before the Civil War. He analyzed whether such efforts were primarily the seeds of Southern resistance to racial integration or had a more honorable, broader legacy. Beienburg sought to understand such developments by providing an account of state constitutional resistance since 1880. In short, this project aimed to better understand the historical legacy of state participation in constitutional politics in order to make sense of its current manifestations.

Selected Recent Publications

"The People Against Themselves: Rethinking Popular Constitutionalism." Law and Social Inquiry 41, no. 1 (Feb 2016)

"Contesting the U.S. Constitution through State Amendments." Political Science Quarterly 129, no. 1 (March 2014): 55-85.

Laura Blessing - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: The New Politics of Taxation: The Republican Party and Anti-Tax Positions

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Andrea Campbell, MIT

Laura Blessing is a Senior Fellow at The Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University.

Blessing earned her PhD from the University of Virginia. While at UVa she taught courses on Congress, the Presidency, and Media and Politics for students at both UVa and Sweet Briar College.  After defending her dissertation she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.  She served as the legislative assistant for tax policy for Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee.  She is currently working on a book on the politics of tax policy from the mid-century to today. Blessings' areas of expertise include the politics of tax policy, legislative politics, the legislative process, the state of partisanship, Congressional operation and history, and Executive-Legislative relations.

Blessing's dissertation investigated the development of our current tax politics.  In the mid-1950s to mid-1970s a balanced budget consensus and low levels of politicization were apparent.  Since then, these have changed, with profound consequences.  This transformation has been caused, not by ideological or economic factors, but rather by a national Republican party-building strategy.  This is evident in a number of different measures, both qualitative and quantitative, from roll call votes and party platforms to the coordination strategies of national party leaders.  The party has used an explicitly anti-tax strategy to win elections and build a powerful coalition of many otherwise disparate groups. 

Rebecca Bohrman - Political Science, Yale University

Project: Sifting Immigrants: The Political and Historical Roots of Administrative Failure in the I.N.S.

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Daniel Tichenor, University of Oregon

Bohrman has over seven years of corporate research experience, in which she has used her qualitative and quantitative research skills to help clients with benchmarking, media strategies, corporate social responsibility campaigns, media monitoring, corporate crises, internal and external communications, and executive transitions.

In her dissertation, she argued that the INS's problems can be traced to its institutional design, and that these problems are perpetuated by the particular alignment of political conflict over immigration issues. Immigration administration is at the center of American politics, affecting everyone from legal and undocumented immigrants to workers and employers, yet Immigration and Naturalization Service has been troubled since its inception. Bohrman's dissertation explained why the INS has been an agency in disarray, by answering the question: why has Congress so rarely tried and even more rarely succeeded in giving the INS greater administrative capacity?

Carl Bon Tempo - History, University of Virginia

Project: The Politics of American Refugee Policy, 1952–1980

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Gary Gerstle, Vanderbilt University

Carl Bon Tempo is Associate Professor of History at the State University New York, Albany.

Bon Tempo's work explores the links between domestic political history and America’s role in the world. He maintains a particular focus on the histories of refugees, immigration, and human rights.

Bon Tempo wrote his dissertation on the formation and implementation of the American government's policies toward refugees between 1952 and 1980, arguing that the study of refugee policies provides an opportunity to examine how Americans (in and out of government) conceived of citizenship and "American-ness" in the post-World War II era – and that these conceptions vitally influenced the intent and character of specific refugee policies and programs. He displayed that post-World War II era American refugee policies and laws, and the contentious deliberations that produced them, resembled the larger debates about citizenship and national identity occurring during that period.

Selected Recent Publications

Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2008).

“From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s” in  Petra Goedde and William Hitchcock, eds, The Human Rights Revolution: An International History,  (New York: Oxford University Press, January 2012).

“American Exceptionalism and Modern Immigration History in the United States.” in Jamey Carson and Sylvia Soderlind, eds., American Exceptionalisms (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, December, 2011.)

Rebecca Brubaker - International Politics, University of Oxford

Project: From the Un-Mixing to the Re-Mixing of Peoples: Understanding U.S.-Led Support for Minority Returns Following the Ethnic Conflict in Bosnia

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Susan Hyde, University of California, Berkeley

Rebecca Brubaker completed her doctorate in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, where her research focused on international solutions to forced displacement following ethnic conflicts. Following graduation, she became a Visiting Fellow at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to her scholarship, she has worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Migration Unit, the UN Development Program, and spent extensive time in the field. Brubaker is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Scholarship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and a Smith Richardson Fellowship (Yale). 

Brubaker’s dissertation focused on the U.S.-led response to the 1990s' ethnic conflict in Bosnia. Her work illuminated the multilateral attempt to reverse the ethnic conflict through the return of displaced people.  The policy emphasis on “re-mixing” people, interpreted through a policy of minority returns, and supported and coordinated on an international scale, was unprecedented in contemporary history.

Emily Brunner - History, University of Chicago

Project: Irish-American Nationalists and the Dilemmas of National Belonging

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Timothy Meagher, Catholic University of America

Emily Brunner is Senior Academic Advisor at the University of Iowa.

Her scholarly interests include American Progressive reform, Irish nationalism, and the problem of state power in the post-World War I era. She received the O'Shaughnessy Award for her research topic, "Irish American Nationalists and the Dilemma of National Allegiance: 1910–24" from the University of Chicago Department of History.

Brunner's dissertation examined how Irish nationalist leaders responded to changing ideas about citizenship and how they contributed to the debate about what it meant to be a member of a state and a nation. She began with an exploration of the conditions during this period that made it more difficult for Irish-Americans to claim to be both Irish and American. Next Brunner discussed the debate over the boundaries of legitimate dissent while examining the connections between Irish-American nationalism and the global feminist movement, analyzing ways in which Irish nationalist women employed global feminist networks to access and sway audiences that might otherwise have been hostile to their cause.

Selected Recent Publications

"Coaching pre-medical students towards professionalism." with Kate Karacay. Clearinghouse, 2013.

Sarah S. Bush - Politics, Princeton University

Project: The Democracy Establishment

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Miles Kahler, University of California, San Diego

Sarah Bush is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University

Bush is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. Prior to starting at Temple, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University in November 2011.

Her research and teaching interests include international relations, democracy promotion, non-state actors in world politics, gender and human rights policy, and Middle East politics. Her book, which is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, explores how how and why the United States and other developed countries turned to democracy promotion at the end of the Cold War and what the impact of doing so has been. The book combines large-N analysis of new and existing data sets of democracy assistance projects with case studies that draw on field research in Jordan and Tunisia. Other ongoing projects examine the effects of American democracy promotion on public attitudes in the Middle East. Her previous research has been published or is forthcoming in the journals International Organization and International Studies Quarterly.

Selected Recent Publications

The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion does not Confront Dictators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

“Anti-Americanism, Authoritarian Regimes, and Attitudes about Women in Politics: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Jordan.” with Amaney Jamal. International Studies Quarterlyol 59, no. 1 (2015): 34-45.
"International Politics and the Spread of Quotas for Women in Legislatures." International Organization 65, no. 1 (2011): 103-137.

Brent Cebul - History, University of Virginia

Project: The Rise of Antigovernment Governance: The Politics of Federal Economic Development and Local Business Mobilization, 1938–1994

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: James Sparrow, University of Chicago

Brent Cebul is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of North Carolina/Charlotte. Previously he was the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.

In 2014-2015, he was a Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Virginia in August 2014 and continues to serve as an Associate Fellow at UVa's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture where he is a project investigator for the Thriving Cities Project and serves as the associate director of the program on Culture, Capitalism, and Global Change. Cebul's current book project, Developmental State: Business, Poverty, and Economic Empowerment from the New Deal to the New Democrats, recenters the history of 20th-century liberalism by highlighting the recurring governing pattern of local-national, public-private partnerships begun in the New Deal.

Cebul’s dissertation was a social and political history of local business leaders’ perceptions of the federal government’s proper role in fostering community and economic development from the New Deal through the early 1990s. The project explored how business constituencies in the rural Sunbelt and deindustrializing Rustbelt created kindred public-private institutions that benefited from and sought to expand local, state, and federal developmental capacities. By illuminating the intertwined themes of localism and the evolution of fiscal federalism through the lens of the development policies of the New Deal, the Great Society, and Nixon and Reagan’s New Federalisms, the dissertation challenged assumptions about the decline of liberalism, the rise of conservatism, and business leaders’ embrace of neoliberal policy prescriptions. 

Seth Center - History, University of Virginia

Project: Spreading the American Dream?: Power, Image, and U.S. Diplomacy, 1968–1976

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Emily Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine

Seth Center is a Historian in the Special Projects Division of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State.

His principal duty consists of conducting policy-supportive historical analyses. He serves as historian for Deputy Secretary William J. Burns. 

Center is researching, writing, and managing the “Iraq History Project” focused on the role of diplomacy and diplomats in Iraq between 2003 and 2012. He is researching and writing the history of public diplomacy and “The War of Ideas” requested by the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. On the request of policymakers, including the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretary, he produces short historical analyses and briefs to support budget justifications, policy formulation, and Congressional testimony. He is researching and writing a “Lessons Learned” study on historical case studies of learning in intelligence and policy for the Director of National Intelligence “Lessons Learned” initiative. In this role he supports historically-based departmental “Lessons Learned” projects with other bureaus and interagency partners including the intelligence community and military. Other duties include advising department principals on preserving and managing historical records; serving on the Department’s Electronic Records Working Group for the Under Secretary for Management; conducting oral histories with current and former officials including Secretaries of State, diplomats, military officers, and intelligence professionals; and briefing/lecturing internal government (diplomatic, intelligence, and military) audiences on US foreign policy, military and intelligence policy and history, and State Department history.

Center's dissertation examined how America's image-makers in the United States Information Agency defined America's image problems in the midst of the turmoil and transformations of the 1970s, designed a program focused on the Bicentennial of the American Revolution to allay global anxiety and hostility, and implemented public diplomacy effort overseas. It concluded with an analysis of the international response to the campaign. 

Selected Recent Publications

The Evolution of American Public Diplomacy: Four Historical Insights, State Department Fact Sheet (December 2, 2013).

Christy Chapin - History, University of Virginia

Project: Ensuring America's Health: Publicly Constructing the Private Health Insurance Industry, 1945–1970

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Deborah Stone, Dartmouth College

Christy Chapin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Her interests include political, business, and economic history as well as capitalism studies. Chapin has published articles in Studies in American Political Development and the Journal of Policy History. Her book, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Insurance System, was published by Cambridge University Press in summer 2015.  Professor Chapin is now at work on a new project entitled The U.S. Economy and the Emergence of Financial Capitalism.

Her dissertation explored how insurance companies became the primary financiers and coordinators of health care by evaluating how federal policy and debates interacted with two institutional levels: first, trade and professional associations and second, ground-level organizations such as individual firms and physician offices. She showed that by 1970, government policy had helped create an expensive, corporate model of health care. Cost problems were built into the system, because doctors behaved as semi-autonomous "managers" whose interests and pecuniary concerns diverged from those of the financiers – insurance companies. Chapin concluded that federal policy helped position insurance companies at the heart of a distinctive public-private system.

Selected Recent Publications

Worried About Big Insurance Company Mergers? You Should Be.

Insurance Companies, Health Care, and You

Why insurance companies control your medical care

Bipartisan Health Care Reform That Would Energize Both Left And Right (Forbes)

Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

"Going Behind with that Fifteen CentPolicy': Black-Owned Insurance Companies and the State." Journal of Policy History 24, no. 4 (2012): 644-674.

"The American Medical Association, Health Insurance Association of America, and Creation of the Corporate Health Care System." Studies in American Political Development (October 2010).

Emily Charnock - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: From Ghosts to Shadows: The National Party Organizations and Interest Groups

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Elisabeth Clemens, University of Chicago

Emily Charnock is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge.

In her dissertation, “From Ghosts to Shadows: The National Party Organizations and Interest Groups,” Charnock explores the institutional impact of the relationship between key interest groups and the parties with which they have traditionally been allied. Her project promises to inform our current debate about the way interest groups like the Tea Party or labor can drive the political debate and party’s agendas. Charnock has published a co-authored piece in Political Science Quarterly.

Selected Recent Publications

"The Second Emancipation Proclamation." Virginia Quarterly Review, August 28, 2013.

"What happened to post-partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System." with Sidney M. Milkis, Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (2012): 57-76.

"What to Expect in the Second Term: Presidential Travel and the Rise of Legacy Building, 1957-2009." with James A. McCann and Dunn Tenpas, Brookings Institute: Issues in Governance Studies 54 (December 2012)

Anthony Chen - Sociology, University of California - Berkeley

Project: From Fair Employment to Equal Opportunity and Beyond: Race, Liberalism, and the Politics of the New Deal Order, 1941–1971

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

Anthony S. Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Northwestern University.

Previously, Chen was Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In addition to holding appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, he was also a Faculty Associate in the Program in American Cultures. From 2005 to 2007, he held the position of Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. Chen's book, The Fifth Freedom (Princeton, 2009), won the President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association. Chen received his B.A. from Rice University 1994 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002.

Selected Recent Publications

The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972. (Princeton University Press, 2009)

“Political Parties and the Sociological Imagination: Past, Present, and Future Directions.” with Stephanie L. Mudge. Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014): 305-330.

Jenny Diamond Cheng - Political Science, University of Michigan

Project: Are Children Citizens?: The Minimum Voting Age and Liberal Democratic Citizenship

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Carol Sanger, Columbia Law School

Jenny Diamond Cheng is a Lecturer in Law at Vanderbilt University’s Law School.

Cheng's research focuses on the intersection of law and political theory. Her doctoral dissertation addressed the question: Given their disenfranchisement, to what extent does it still make sense to think of children as "citizens"? Her research focused on political discussions of the minimum voting age from 1942 to the present. The decades in and after World War II witnessed a quiet but persistent movement to reduce the voting age from 21 to 18, which gathered steam in the late 1960s and culminated with the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971. A close reading of the debates about the voting age over the last six decades reveals competing ideas about the meaning of the franchise and profound confusion about children's place in the polity. In her dissertation, Cheng explored the theoretical links between voting, military service, and education while additionally examining how advocates for lower voting ages have sought to frame youth as the natural heirs to the women's suffrage and African-American civil rights movements.

Selected Recent Publications

"Leave the Voting Age Alone." New York Times, 28 May 2012.

Merlin Chowkwanyun - History and Public Health, University of Pennsylvania

Project: The Dilemmas of 'Community Health': 1945-2000

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Nancy Langston, Michigan Technological University

Merlin Chowkwanyun is Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a member of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health.

Chowkwanyun’s work centers on three themes: the history of public health and health policy; racial inequality; and social movements. He is working on a book examining the development of post-WWII medical care and environmental health hazards in four regions (Los Angeles, Cleveland, Central Appalachia, and New York) and another about political unrest at medical schools and neighborhood health activism during the 1960s and 1970s. With Adolph Reed, he is writing an essay collection that questions the dominant theoretical assumptions and frames in disparities research (under contract with the University of California Press). With the Center for Public Integrity, he is part of a group of environmental health journalists and historians on a database featuring millions of previously unseen corporate documents that have emerged in recent environmental health lawsuits. He teaches courses on health advocacy and mixed methods.

Selected Recent Publications

"Q&A with Pau Gasol: The NBA All-Star's Health Advocacy Off-the-Court," Culture of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, April 20, 2015.

"Grassroots Isn't Always Best." Boston Review, February 23, 2015.

"We keep pledging to study the cause of riots like Ferguson’s. And we keep ignoring the lessons." The Washington Post, August 18, 2014.

"Training Historians and the Dual Degree." Chronicle of Higher Education, January 28, 2014.

Sarah Coleman - History, Princeton University

Project: Redefining American: The Shifting Politics of Immigration Policy at the End of the 20th Century

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: David Gutiérrez, University of California, San Diego

Sarah Coleman’s dissertation “Redefining American: The Shifting Politics of Immigration Policy at the End of the 20th Century,” explores how politicians, activists, citizens and the courts competed to define the rights of immigrant persons in the U.S. who did not have American citizenship status in the last quarter of the twentieth-century. With the passage of the landmark Hart-Celler Act in 1965, the United States entered a new era of immigration.  This period of massive immigration led to a fierce struggle, which has been at the heart of contemporary American political history, between activists who fought to ensure rights and benefits for these newcomers and those who opposed open borders and sought to limit the rights of immigrants.

Battles over education, health, welfare, and civil liberties were deeply influenced by this influx of immigration.  This phase in the longer struggle over the rights of immigrants began in the mid-1970s when a network of liberal activists, who had roots in the civil rights movement, successfully fought in the courts to expand the rights of non-citizens to include protection from workplace discrimination, the benefits of the welfare state, and the right to education and other social services. Coleman’s dissertation then looks at the politics of immigration policy that followed these revolutionary court decisions through to the early twenty first century.  In doing so, she traces the development of a movement, within both political parties, to limit the expansion of these rights.  She focuses on some of their success but also on the challenges and obstacles that they have encountered in rolling back the changes that took place since 1965.  

Selected Recent Publications

"Sorry, Trump. Ike's shameful program failed." CNN, November 12, 2015.

Joseph Crespino - History, Stanford University

Project: Strategic Accommodation: Civil Rights Opponents in Mississippi and their Impact on American Racial Politics, 1953–1972

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Charles Payne, Chicago Public Schools

Joseph Crespino is Professor of History at Emory University.

Crespino's Research considers white Southerners more directly in the context of the emerging conservative politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to reflect the complicated role that race has played in the emergence of modern conservatism.

Crespino's dissertation, "Strategic Accommodation: Civil Rights Opponents in Mississippi and their Impact on American Racial Politics, 1953–1972," won the 2003 Dissertation Award from the Jepson School of Leadership at the University of Richmond. It examined the impact of racial desegregation on political culture in the American South by providing a case study of resistance and accommodation to civil rights reform in Mississippi's white community. His project revealed how key policy makers along with local economic elites led an accommodation to racial change that accepted token forms of desegregation in ways that preserved racial and economic privilege and forestalled further civil rights reform.

Selected Recent Publications

Strom Thurmond's America (Hill and Wang, 2012)

Gretchen Crosby Sims - Political Science, Stanford University

Project: Social Responsibility and the Political Power of American Business

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Cathie Martin, Boston University

Gretchen Crosby Sims is a Director at Social Finance UK.

She is focused on expanding Social Finance’s advocacy and policy efforts to support and encourage those seeking to redesign public services through outcomes-based commissioning. She is also engaged in supporting specific projects in children, family, and education related areas.

Gretchen’s career prior to Social Finance focused on identifying and scaling social interventions to improve people’s lives and to promoting supportive public policies.  Most recently, she was the chief program executive at The Joyce Foundation, where she oversaw strategy and impact evaluation process for seven grantmaking programs – education, environment, employment, gun violence prevention, democracy, culture, and special opportunities – and helped win evidence-based social policy changes in numerous issue areas. In earlier roles, Gretchen led Joyce’s K-12 education grant making and served as Director of Strategic Initiatives. Gretchen has also worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, CNN, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and as a policy adviser to presidential candidate Bill Bradley. She holds PhD and MA degrees in political science from Stanford University and a BA in government from Harvard University.

Sims's dissertation examined the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among America's most powerful companies as a source of political power. In recent years, many companies have embraced the notion of CSR and invested significant resources in strengthening their communities, supporting their employees, protecting the environment, and making philanthropic contributions. She argued that many of the things firms do in the name of CSR represent the provision of public goods, the practice of self-regulation, or the giving of politically valuable philanthropic gifts. These activities can give firms special standing with three groups of political actors: legislators, regulators, and other interest groups.

Michele Davis Jones - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: Beyond Redistricting: How the Voting Rights Act Has Transformed Politics in a Southern City

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Clarence Stone, University of Maryland

Jones wrote her dissertation on how the Voting Rights Act generated an enormous amount of scholarship, while considering the empirical consequences of the act by looking at its impact on the descriptive and substantive representation of minorities. Jones stated that it is unclear if minorities actually benefited from the increased number of minority representatives, while additionally continuing the effort to assess the question of descriptive versus substantive representation. Her dissertation looked at the politics of a Southern city before and after it was forced to adopt majority-minority districts.

Jefferson Decker - History, Columbia University

Project: The Conservative Legal Movement and American Government, 1971–1987

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Daniel Ernst, Georgetown University Law Center

Jefferson Decker is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University.

Decker writes about politics and government in twentieth-century America.  He is the author of The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government (Oxford University Press, 2016) in which he illustrates how a series of legal battles over property rights and the regulatory state shaped the public ideas and policy agenda of modern U.S. conservatism.

His dissertation described the political mobilization of conservative lawyers and their attempt to reform and reshape American government. In the 1970s, conservative lawyers, political activists, and donors created a network of non-profit legal foundations in order to challenge liberalism in the courts. These groups took on a variety of cases, from challenging local land use regulations and offering a "pro-business" perspective on environmental disputes to challenging "sweetheart deals" between government agencies and liberal trial lawyers. In doing so, they sought to reassert principles of federalism and limited government, while restricting (or rolling back) the regulatory state. After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, veterans of these firms took jobs in the new administration, where they had an opportunity to rework some of the policies they had litigated from inside the government. In describing this journey from outsiders to policymakers, this dissertation described the evolution of public policy and conservative ideas about the law during the Reagan era.

Selected Recent Publications

The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government. (Oxford University Press, 2016)

“Legal Conservatism.” in Oxford University Encyclopedia of American Political, Policy, and Legal History (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Jesse R. Driscoll - Political Science , Stanford University

Project: Exiting Anarchy: Militia Politics and the Post-Soviet Peace

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Mark Beissinger, Princeton University

Jesse Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Driscoll's primary area of interest is mapping the processes by which hierarchies emerge after periods of violence. His working hypothesis is that in the modern state system, national governments establish legitimate authority through a process of identifying, labeling, monitoring, and ultimately socializing unruly populations. How (and whether) third-party assistance can aid in these tasks is disputed. Driscoll's work has focused especially on theories that account for both variation in patterns of violence against civilians and variation in settlement strategies by armed groups. He is currently managing a number of research projects in Georgia and Tajikistan, mapping social networks, party formation, voter intimidation, and the range of technologies used by semi-authoritarian regimes to stay in power.

Driscoll's dissertation demystified the mechanisms of civil war settlement in the Former Soviet Union. By carefully comparing the experiences of two states – Georgia and Tajikistan – Driscoll reconstructed narratives of state renovation based on patterns of local similarities inside new fragile states. He gathered empirical materials for his dissertation over 21 months of fieldwork in Tajikistan and Georgia. With more than 300 field interviews, Driscoll's dissertation presented a revisionist history of the conflict resolution processes that took place in these two states. He argued that peace emerged in Georgia and Tajikistan through a process that bore only a superficial resemblance to the idealized one imagined by foreign donors. The areas he examined are 1) disarming militias, 2) institutionalizing presidential power, and 3) territorial reintegration.

Joshua Dunn - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: Judges, Lawyers, and Experts: Law vs. Politics in Missouri vs. Jenkins

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Shep Melnick, Boston College

Joshua Dunn is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

Dunn's research primarily focuses on constitutional history and judicial policymaking. He is the author of Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins (University of North Carolina Press), which explores the judicial attempt to desegregate the Kansas City, Missouri school system. He co-edited, with Martin West, From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary's Role in American Education (Brookings Institution Press). He also co-authors, with Martha Derthick, a quarterly article on law and education for the journal Education Next. Previously he taught at the College of William & Mary and was a fellow in contemporary history, public policy, and American politics at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia. He recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2002.

Selected Recent Publications

Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins. (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University. with Jon Shields (Oxford University Press, 2016).

"The Paradoxes of Politics in Colorado Springs." The Forum 12, no. 2 (2014): 329-42.

"Who Governs in God's City?" Society, 49 no. 1 (2012): 24-32.

Maxine Eichner - Political Science, University of North Carolina

Project: Reinstating Family: Rethinking the Relationship Between the Family and the State

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Molly Shanley, Vassar College

Maxine Eichner is Reef C. Ivey II Professor of Law at University of North Carolina School of Law.

Her teaching and research interests include sex equality, family law, legal theory and torts. She writes on issues of liberal theory, feminist theory, and family law. Eichner's recent scholarship focuses on the stance that the state should take with respect to family ties among citizens. Eichner received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale University (where she was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal), before pursuing her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. She held a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship through Georgetown Law School, and clerked for Judge Louis Oberdorfer in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, as well as for Judge Betty Fletcher in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She practiced civil rights, women's rights, and employment law for several years at the law firm of Patterson, Harkavy, and Lawrence in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Eichner's dissertation, "Reinstating Family: Rethinking the Relationship Between the Family and the State," explored the relationship between state and family by examining the understandings of the family-state relationship embodied in three different areas of contemporary United States law. Specifically, she studied the intersection between parenting and the workplace, the state and federal laws delineated "family" and the laws governing the relationship among parents, children, and public schools. She argued that a more nuanced, richer understanding of the relationship between family and state should be incorporated into American law.

Selected Recent Publications

The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America's Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2010). 

"The New Child Abuse Panic." The New York Times, July 11, 2015.

"Market-Cautious Feminism." in Austin Sarat, ed. Special Issue: Feminist Legal Theory Studies, in Law, Politics and Society 69 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2016): 141 - 187.

"The Supportive State: Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking." in Care Ethics and Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jack Epstein - History, Ohio University

Project: Behind the Menancing Racket: Organized Labor, Federal Anti-Racketeering Policy, and the Law and Order Origins of the Modern American State, 1927–1970

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Daniel Ernst, Georgetown University Law Center

Jack Epstein is an Instructor at Tulane University.

Epstein’s dissertation promises to recast the history of the New Deal state and its policy and political legacies, by exploring the emergence of federal racketeering laws. Conservatives up to the 1970s, he contends, used these mechanisms to undermine the New Deal state by fostering competition and resisting federal intervention in labor markets. Titled “Behind the Menacing Racket: Organized Labor, Federal Anti-Racketeering Policy, and the Law and Order Origins of the Modern American State, 1927-1970,” Epstein’s project challenges traditional assumptions about the development of political ideologies. 

Jasmine Farrier - Government, University of Texas - Austin

Project: Why Congress Delegates Decisions on the Budget: Institutional Origins and Consequences

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Louis Fisher, Congressional Research Service, Government Division, Library of Congress

Jasmine Farrier is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville.

Jasmine Farrier grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and developed her interest in political science as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In graduate school, she studied American political development at the University of Texas at Austin and received her Ph.D. in Government in 2000. In 2002, Farrier joined the Dept. of Political Science at the University of Louisville.  Her current research includes a new book project on inter-branch lawsuits, separation of powers, and constitutional law.

Selected Recent Publications

Passing the Buck: Congress, the Budget, and Deficits. (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

"The Contemporary Presidency: Judicial Restraint and the New War Powers." Presidential Studies Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2016): 387-410.

"Louis Fisher on Congress and the Budget: Institutional Responsibility and the Other Taboos." PS: Political Science & Politics 46, no. 3 (2013): 510-514.

"Barack Obama and Budget Deficits: Signs of a Neo-Whig Presidency?" Presidential Studies Quarterly 41, no.3 (2011): 618-634.

Michael Fein - History, Brandeis University

Project: Public Works: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Richard John, Columbia University

Michael Fein is an Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences and an Associate Professor of History at Johnson & Wales University.

Fein's dissertation led to Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956 (Kansas University, 2008), which won the Annual Archives Award for Excellence in Research from the New York State Archives. Fein has also published a collaborative work with Professor David Moss at the Harvard Business School. 

Fein's dissertation, "Public Works: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956," examined the link between infrastructure and political development. The project used New York State as a case study to explore the expansion of state capacity, providing a historical perspective on the development of New York's massive public works program, from the paving of the first state roads to the construction of the Thruway. In so doing, Fein shed light on the ways in which public construction helped to reconfigure landscapes and communities, as well as political and economic structures. From that study, he drew important insights on a vital question in policy history: How have the units of the state addressed modern problems that are national in scope but local in implementation?

Selected Recent Publications

Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880-1956 (University Press of Kansas, 2008)

“Tunnel Vision: ‘Invisible’ Highways and Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ in the Age of Privatization." Journal of Planning History 11, no. 1 (2008): 47-69.

Kathleen Grammatico Ferraiolo - Government, University of Virginia

Project: A Theory of Drug Control Policy in the Twentieth Century and the Success of Drug Law Reform in the 1990s

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Mark Landy, Boston College

Kathleen Grammatico Ferraiolo is Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University.

Ferraiolo's research agenda focuses primarily on direct democracy as a policymaking institution in the American states. Current projects examine state legislators’ response to successful initiatives, the federalism implications of direct democracy, and variations in state and federal approaches to morality policies including drug control and gambling. 

Ferraiolo's dissertation explained the success of medical marijuana initiatives and the willingness of a majority of Americans to reject an important component of federal drug policy. She began by placing the medical marijuana movement in the historical context of twentieth century federal drug control policy. Ferraiolo argued that the institutional locus of control over policy, the way the drug issue was framed, and the formulators and administrators of policy created a federal drug control regime that was highly resistant to fundamental reform. Further, she proposed that changes in these factors – a shift in institutional venue from the federal government to the states and the direct democracy process, a new way of framing drug policy debates that emphasized patient rights and compassion, and an alliance between marijuana activists and political campaign professionals who had the resources to challenge the federal government – helped bring about policy change.

Selected Recent Publications

"Selective Media Exposure and Partisan Differences about Sarah Palin's Candidacy.” with David A. Jones and Jennifer Byrne, Politics & Policy 39, no. 2 (April 2011): 195-221

Jonathon Free - History, Duke University

Project: Redistributing Risk: The Political Ecology of Coal in Late-Twentieth Century Appalachia

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Richard White, Stanford University

Free has been selected as the Miller Center/Hagley Library Dissertation Fellow in Business and Politics. Jonathon Free’s dissertation traces the U.S. coal industry’s increased reliance on surface mining in the late twentieth century. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed new mine safety regulations that significantly lowered the number of deaths from explosions, roof-falls, and other underground disasters. Coal companies responded to safety legislation by expanding surface mining operations, which were less accident-prone but more environmentally destructive than underground mines.

This redistribution of the risks of mining had profound implications for the political culture of coal mining communities. In Appalachian states like Kentucky and West Virginia, where coal companies traditionally played a major role in the local economy, the mining jobs that remained became more precious, as did the few mountains left untouched by surface mining operations. Meanwhile, the risks of surface mining became more acceptable to many coalfield residents as the industry depicted it as a way to provide the energy that the nation needed while also improving both the aesthetic quality and economic attractiveness of the land. As a result, the debate over surface mining became a point of fracture in increasingly divided communities.

While scholars of environmental policy, American business, or working-class communities have tended to analyze the history of each subfield separately, this project draws on the history of capitalism, critical geography, and interdisciplinary studies of regulation to argue that the shared history of policymakers, business people, and workers did not unfold in insolated silos. 

Beth A. Freeborn - Economics, University of Virginia

Project: Drug Laws and the Market for Cocaine

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Peter Reuter, University of Maryland

Beth Freeborn is an Economist at the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Freeborn was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg where she taught courses on Microeconomics and Industrial Organization. Her research focuses on industrial organization, applied microeconomics, economics of crime and econometrics.

Freeborn's dissertation was an economic study of the market for powder and crack cocaine using data collected from the Drug Enforcement Agency from 1984 to 2001. She examined how drug dealers make decisions regarding what type of cocaine package to produce. The benefit to dealers is the total revenue they receive from the packages they sell, and the cost to dealers is both the monetary cost of purchasing the wholesale cocaine and the legal penalty if they are caught selling cocaine. These legal penalties vary greatly by state, providing different incentives to dealers based on geographical location. This project created and estimated a model of the market for cocaine. This model can then be utilized to analyze a number of different public policy questions.

Selected Recent Publications

"Determinants of Tacit Collusion in a Cournot Duopoly Experiment." with Lisa R. Anderson and Jason P. Hulbert, Southern Economic Journal 81, no. 3 (January 2015): 633-652.

"Report to Congress Under Section 319 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003." with Julie Miller, Federal Trade Commission (2015)

"Accuracy of Information Maintained by U.S. Credit-Bureaus: Frequency of Errors and Effects on Consumers' Credit Scores." with L. Douglas Smith et al.  Journal of Consumer Affairs 47, no. 3 (2013): 588-601.

"Competition and Crowding-Out in the Market for Outpatient Substance Abuse Treatment." with Andrew Cohen and Brian McManus, International Economic Review 54, no. 1 (2013): 159-184.

Lori Fritz - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: Weaving the Safety Net, Strand by Strand: State Health Care Regimes

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Chris Howard, College of William & Mary

Lori Fritz is an analyst with the Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C.

Fritz's dissertation examined health care policy at the state level in light of previous work on the historical development of the "private welfare state" in health care. As with earlier studies focusing on national politics, she found that the fragmentation of the health care system into private and public sectors posed significant obstacles to policies intended to increase access to health care. However, state governments were being driven to find new ways to overcome this fragmentation and ensure better health care for their citizens, often through innovative institutional arrangements such as commissions and task forces that are outside the usual realm of politics. Fritz's study included case analyses of Florida and Pennsylvania – two states that took different approaches toward health system reform.

Beverly Gage - History, Columbia University

Project: The Wall Street Explosion: Capitalism, Terrorism, and the Origins of the FBI

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Alan Dawley

Beverly Gage is professor of history and director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.

She is a historian of 20th-century American politics and society and teaches courses on modern American political history, liberalism and conservatism, communism and anticommunism, and the craft of historical writing. She is currently writing a major new biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover titled G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century, to be published by Viking in 2017. Her first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded, explored the dramatic story of the 1920 bombing of Wall Street and the history of early-20th-century terrorism. It is currently in production as a documentary film for broadcast on The American Experience (PBS) in late 2015. Gage writes widely for publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, and Slate. She appears frequently on the PBS NewsHour, among other outlets, as a historical and political commentator. In 2015-2016, she was elected to serve as the first Chair of Yale’s inaugural Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate.

Gage received her B.A. in American Studies (magna cum laude, with distinction) from Yale College in 1994, and her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2004. Her dissertation received the 2004 Bancroft Dissertation Award for graduate work in U.S. History. In 2009, she received the Sarai Ribicoff award for teaching excellence in Yale College. She is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and an elected member of the Society of American Historians.

Selected Recent Publications

The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2009)

"More 'Progressive' Than Thou" The New York Times Magazine, January 12, 2016.

Daniel Galvin - Political Science, Yale University

Project: Presidential Party Building in the United States

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia

Daniel Galvin is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Northwestern University.

His research focuses on the development of political institutions, political organizations, and public policy in the United States. He is the author of Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton University Press, 2010), numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and coeditor of Rethinking Political Institutions: the Art of the State (NYU Press, 2006). His current research examines the effects of organized labor’s decline on public policy, party politics, and the working poor.

Galvin has won the “Emerging Scholar Award” from the American Political Science Association’s Political Organizations and Parties section, the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching from Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, the R. Barry Farrell Teaching Award from the Department of Political Science, and was twice elected by the Northwestern student body to the Faculty Honor Roll. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Political Science department and is affiliated with the Comparative-Historical Social Science program. He is a co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary Political Parties Working Group and the American Politics Workshop.

Galvin's dissertation examined the actions undertaken by presidents to change their parties, and finds that at best only half the story is in view. The aim of his dissertation was to demonstrate the fact that some modern presidents have acted more constructively with regard to their parties than others, to consider why this might be so, and to bring presidential party building into view as a component of modern American political development whose significance and variability is clearly evident in politics today.

Selected Recent Publications

Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, Princeton University Press (2010).

"Wage Theft, Public Policy, and the Politics of Workers' Rights," Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series WP-15-08 (2015). 
"Qualitative Methods and American Political Development" in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert Lieberman, eds. (2015).

"Presidents as Agents of Change" Presidential Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2014).

Kathryn Gardner - Political Science, University of Notre Dame

Project: Politicizing Religion: A Comparative Look at the Origins and Development of Muslim Incorporation Policies in France, Great Britain, and the United States, 1945–2008

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: John Esposito, Georgetown University

Gardner earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. International Relations from the University of Notre Dame and her B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Miami University. Her research interests include international relations, comparative politics, institutionalization of Islam in Europe, and religion-state relations.

Gardner's dissertation addresses Western governmental policies toward Muslim minorities using controlled cross-case and within-case methods. She seeks to identify, analyze, and explain the origins and evolution of national Muslim incorporation policies and how and why they differ across three country cases: France, Great Britain, and the United States. Moreover, Gardner's dissertation focuses on how transnational events affected Western governments' perception of religion, specifically Islam, rendering it a central policy problem, and thereby explaining the timing of the policy shift and its construction as a "religious problem."

Lily Geismer - History, University of Michigan

Project: Don't Blame Us: Grassroots Liberalism in Massachusetts, 1960-1990

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Nancy Maclean, Duke University

Lily Geismer is Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.

Geismer's teaching and research focuses on the intersections of political realignment, public policy, grassroots social movements and metropolitan history since World War II. Her first book Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party will be released in December 2014. She is currently beginning work on a new project that will examine the privatization of public policy, and the increasing promotion of market-based and individualist ideology to address social inequality by both political parties since the 1960s.

Geismer's dissertation recasted the conventional narratives of liberalism, civil rights, suburban politics, and electoral realignment. Most accounts of postwar suburban politics have focused primarily on Republican mobilization and fail to acknowledge that during the last half-century the Democratic Party has also become primarily suburban-centered in both base and outlook. Geismer's community study explored how suburban liberals shaped the social and political landscape in the Bay State and the nation in both progressive and problematic ways. Throughout the postwar period, grassroots liberal activists in Massachusetts proved particularly effective at working within the established channels of government to achieve the passage of laws that aligned with their suburban-centered vision of democracy and fairness. Many of these policies, nevertheless, provided individualist solutions to structural problems that often constrained more than enabled the achievement of spatial and racial equality. Tracing the evolution of this activism and ideology through the overlapping arenas of civil rights, housing, education, growth and development, environmentalism, feminism and antiwar activism, her dissertation revealed how Massachusetts has been able to preserve both its liberal reputation and racially and spatially segregated landscape. In doing so, her project aimed to prove to politicians, policymakers, and scholars across a variety of disciplines that both suburban liberals and Massachusetts need to be understood less for the reasons that they stood against the national tide and more for what they represent about American society and politics over the last 50 years.

Selected Recent Publications

“Good Neighbors for Fair Housing: Suburban Liberalism and Racial Inequality in Metropolitan Boston.” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 3 (May 2013): 454-477.
“Kennedy’s Liberalism.” in A Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Marc Silverstone, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
“Integrating Gender and Political History into Courses on Post-1945 U.S. History.” with Tamar Carroll, Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (March 2012): 28-30.

Shamira Gelbman - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: Coalitions of the Unwilling: Insurgency and Enfranchisement in the United States and South Africa

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Elisabeth Clemens, University of Chicago

Shamira Gelbman is the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wabash College.

Gelbman's research interests include race, social movements, and democratization in the United States and South Africa. 

Based on a paired comparison of the American civil rights movement and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, Gelbman's dissertation argued that state actors' responses to social movements vary with changing coalition dynamics at both the elite and mass levels. Specifically, the confluence of intra-regime conflict and labor-civil rights coalitions provides the incentives for democratic concessions that would otherwise be too politically risky for public officials who are beholden to constituencies that oppose suffrage expansion to undertake.

Selected Recent Publications

"Interest Groups, Twitter, and Civic Education.” in Civic Education in the Twenty-First Century: A Multidimensional Inquiry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): 273-290.

“Affirmative Action.” Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. Stephen L. Danvers (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013). 

“Alien Land Laws.” Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. Stephen L. Danvers (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013). 

Judge Glock - History, Rutgers University

Project: “The Search for a Balanced Economy: The Origins of Federal Intervention in the Mortgage Market, 1916-1960”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Eric Rauchway, University of California - Davis

Judge Glock is currently a visiting assistant professor at the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. Glock's research focuses on American Economic History and the history of central banking and money. His work explores the origins of lender of last resort functions, the development of mortgage markets and the creation of government-sponsored enterprises (GSE). He also works on the history of monetary thought.

Glock earned his PhD in American History at Rutgers University, where his research focused on the political and financial history of the early 20th century. Before coming to Rutgers, Glock did historical research on Native American and environmental affairs for the Department of Justice and taught English in China. He received both his B.A. and M.A. in history from the College of William and Mary, where he completed a thesis on the electric streetcar and urban real estate in Richmond, Virginia.

Glock’s dissertation investigates how and why the federal government became involved in the mortgage market beginning in the 1910s. He hopes to show that a desire for “economic balance” between different sectors, such as agriculture and industry, led the government to create a series of implicitly-guaranteed but nominally private financial corporations, such as the Federal Land Banks, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and Fannie Mae, which could subsidize mortgages in supposedly backward areas of the economy. In practice, however, these corporations focused less on balancing economic sectors than on protecting the financial system and ensuring its overall liquidity. He has presented his work at numerous national conferences, where he most recently discussed the long-term interest rate in the theories of John Maynard Keynes, and the effect of the Federal Housing Administration on American cities. He recently reviewed Matthew Gordon Lasner's book High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, for Planning Perspectives.

Selected Recent Publications

"The Roots of Government Meddling in Mortgages," The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2014.

Adam Goodman - History, University of Pennsylvania

Project: “Mexican Migrants and the Rise of the Deportation Regime, 1942-2012”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University

Adam Goodman is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Beginning fall 2016, he will be an Assistant Professor of History and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Goodman is a scholar of migration interested in the interconnected histories of people throughout the Americas and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His current book project explores the rise of the deportation regime and the expulsion of Mexicans from the United States since the 1940s. He has published articles, essays, and reviews in academic venues such as the Journal of American Ethnic History and popular outlets such as The Nation and The Washington Post.

Goodman's dissertation examined the history of the deportation of Mexicans from the United States since 1942. The project took a transnational approach, using Spanish- and English-language archival sources and oral histories from Mexico and the US to explore the political, institutional, and social history of deportation over the last seventy years. Ultimately, he argued, the history of deportation challenges the US’s identity as a nation that has welcomed immigrants, in turn calling for a reassessment of how immigration policy and the immigrant experience are understood. Goodman's work was supported by a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship, an NEH Summer Seminar on rethinking international migration, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award. In 2014 the University of Pennsylvania named him a Dean’s Scholar, the highest honor the School of Arts & Sciences can bestow upon a student. 

Selected Recent Publications

“Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration.” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 7-16.

"A Nation of Migrants." Dissent Magazine, October 8, 2015.

“International Migration to the United States: From the Colonial Period to Our Times.” In Dictionnaire des migrations internationales, ed. Gildas Simon. Paris: Armand Colin, 2015. (French)

"The Next Mexican Revolution?" Al Jazeera America (November 20, 2014)

Brendan Green - Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project: Two Concepts of Liberty: American Grand Strategy and the Liberal Tradition

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: James McAllister, Williams College

Brendan Green is the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Leadership Studies at Williams College.

Green's dissertation synthesized and added to scholarly literature that explores the effect of liberal ideology on political life in America and liberalism's influence on American foreign policy traditions. Green argued that differing visions of the concept of liberty led to the splintering of American liberal thought. He developed a theory of liberalism's effects on foreign policy and tested it on American Grand Strategy toward Europe in the 20th century, arguing that the early 20th century and inter-war period featured a back and forth contest between positive and negative versions of liberalism, resulting in the American intervention in World War I, followed by two decades of isolation. After World War II, Green contended, a still relevant conception of negative liberty among American foreign policy elites shaped America's search for an exit from Europe because it was perceived to be less costly; the expansion of the state and the mobilization of resources for foreign policy was perceived to interfere with liberty at home. He argued that by the early 1960s, positive liberty had achieved widespread acceptance among the foreign policy elite, causing a switch to a firm commitment in Europe. Not only was there no longer any perceived trade-off with liberty at home, but the positive conception of liberty implied a need to reinforce and spread market democracy abroad – key prerequisites of achieving a positive notion of political freedom. This led to a continued European commitment and its expansion, through peaceful and warlike means, after the Cold War.

Selected Recent Publications

U.S. Military Innovation Since the Cold War: Creation Without Destruction, with Harvey Sapolsky and Benjamin Friedman, (Routledge 2009).

Sheena Chestnut Greitens - Department of Government, Harvard University

Project: Intelligent Autocrats: Secret Police & State Violence Under Authoritarianism

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Jacob Shapiro, Princeton University

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri and a Non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution

Greitens earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in April 2013. Her work focuses on East Asia, international security, and the internal politics of authoritarian regimes. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the management of internal security in non-democracies.

Her dissertation explores a particularly timely question: why are some authoritarian regimes at times more or less violent than others? By exploring a variety of regimes, Greitens' work has the potential to shed light not just on the nature of these states, but on the kinds of foreign policies best suited to dealing with authoritarian governments.

Her work on China and North Korea has been published widely in academic, policy, and media outlets in English, Chinese, and Korean. She has previously held positions at the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Oxford University Press, and fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Selected Recent Publications

For Sheena's most recent publications and media appearances, visit the Brookings website.

Joanna Grisinger - History, University of Chicago

Project: Reforming the State: Reorganization and the Federal Government, 1937–1964

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Dan Carpenter, Harvard University

Joanna Grisinger is Senior Lecturer in the Legal Studies Program at Northwestern University.

Grisinger works in twentieth-century U.S. legal and political history, with a focus on the modern administrative state. 

In her dissertation, Joanna demonstrated that the period beginning in 1937 was a significant era of government reform of the structures and procedure of the federal government. The procedural reforms of the time created an entirely new administrative framework and system of governance. Her dissertation examined how the federal government developed an uneasy compromise with administrative agencies and administrative forms in this era, and how these organizational and procedural changes influenced the policies that emerged from this new system of democratic governance.

Selected Recent Publications

The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

George Xuezhi Guo - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: The Guanxi (Interpersonal Relations) of Chinese Communist Elite: Theory and Practice

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Lowell Dittmer, University of California, Berkeley

George Xuezhi Guo is Professor of Political Science at Guilford College.

Guo specializes in comparative politics, international politics, East Asian politics, and comparative political thought.

Guo constructed his dissertation around the model of guanxi, an ideal which has deep cultural roots embedded in Chinese philosophy and thought as well as the inspired ideal personality which is preoccupied with a man-centered social system and ethic-oriented social norms. His dissertation, "The Guanxi (Interpersonal Relations) of Chinese Communist Elite: Theory and Practice," established a theoretical model of guanxi in Chinese interactions as exemplified in a study of Chinese Communist Party elite politics. While guanxi is used as an instrument to acquire social resources or political advantages, Guo argued that it also functions as a social norm to comply with social rituals, as a vehicle for communicating emotional attachments, and as a moral obligation to uphold mutual dependence and to ensure mutual stability between people within their networks. In this respect, Guo fundamentally disagreed with the prevalent view of guanxi as consisting only of cunning tactics for pursuing individual personal interests.

Shane Hamilton - Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project: Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Edmund Russell, University of Kansas

Shane Hamilton is Lecturer in International Business and Strategy at the York Management School

The History News Network selected him in 2008 as a "Top Young Historian."

Hamilton's dissertation traced the efforts of state and federal agricultural experts, cooperating with food processors and supermarkets, to create the postwar marketing machine. Emerging from an effort to contain the political controversies surrounding New Dealism in agriculture, this marketing machine sought to eliminate economic uncertainties (such as seasonal and regional variations in production, or potential strikes from unionized workers) from the food distribution chain. According to postwar USDA economists, policymakers, and engineers, the rationalization of food marketing could effectively keep commodity prices high for farmers, without production controls, while consumer food prices remained steady. Industrial farms, high-tech food processors, and suburban supermarkets, by practicing economies of scale and by using the latest technologies – from pesticides on farms to forklifts in cold-storage warehouses – thus emerged as part of a political effort to solve the decades-old "farm problem" by reducing the cost of moving food from farms to consumers. Ultimately, Hamilton hypothesized trucks were political technologies, used to define the contours of public policy regarding foods and farmers.

Selected Recent Publications

The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford-St. Martin's Press, 2014).

"Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post-World War II United States." Technology & Culture (July 2014).

"Supermarkets, Free Markets, and the Problem of Buyer Power in the Postwar United States." in What's Good for Business: Business and Politics since World War II, ed. Julian Zelizer and Kim Phillips-Fein (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Larycia Hawkins - Political Science, University of Oklahoma

Project: Framing the Faith-Based Initiative: Black Church Elites and the Black Policy Agenda

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Drew Smith, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

Larycia Hawkins the Abd el-Kader Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia

Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., Hawkins worked in state government administering federal programs, including the Social Security Disability Programs and the Community Development Block Grant. 

Dr. Hawkins’ research interests lie at the intersection of race, religion, and politics.  She is currently working to publish her dissertation, Framing the Faith-Based Initiative: Black Church Elites and the Black Policy Agenda.  Her active research agenda includes projects that explore the extent to which black theology frames black political rhetoric and how black theology is reflected on black political agendas, like those of the  Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP; and a project that considers the political activism of black congregations outside the ambit of the black church (i.e. black Catholic parishes, United Church of Christ).

Hawkins's dissertation asked: Is the black agenda collective or disparate? Evidence of a disconnect between black mass opinion and the policy agenda of black political elites necessitates scholarly inquiry. For example, 81% of African Americans and Hispanics are favorably disposed toward government-funding of faith-based social services, higher than the 68% of White Americans and 75% of the national sample registering similar support. Yet, the legislative agendas of the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP reveal the active efforts of black political and civic elites to oppose the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Hawkins's dissertation examined this disconnect via the black policy agenda with reference to how the black church, the seminal institution of black society, figures into this puzzle. Her dissertation also determined which policy images contribute to the black political dynamic with regard to the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Specifically, Hawkins demonstrated how black pastors define the Faith-Based and Community Initiative and how pastoral definitions of political issues influence the broader black political process, including black politicians and the black policy agenda.

Selected Recent Publications

Religion and American Politics: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, with Amy Black and Doug Koopman (Pearson, 2011)

Boris Heersink - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: Beyond Service: National Party Organizations and Party Brands in American Politics

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Richard Valelly, Swarthmore College

Boris Heersink’s dissertation focuses on the historical development of the Democratic and Republican National committees (respectively the DNC and RNC) during the 19th and 20th century.The (limited) existing literature on these institutions has argued that party organizations have developed from powerful 19th century local institutions (dominated by party bosses) which controlled candidate selection, into national institutions which hold no such powers and function as mere 'service providers' to party members. Additionally, political scientists have noted that this historical development in national committee activities has not been linear and that, while majority parties in the 20th century frequently ignored their national party organizations, minority parties invested heavily in theirs. He argues that we can best explain both phenomena by viewing the national committees as tools political actors use to promote or define their party's brand. From this perspective, we can explain both why the national committees dramatically expanded their activities in the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as explain why, in subsequent decades, minority parties have had more active national committees than majority parties. Additionally, he argues that this perspective forces us to reconsider the image of the national committees as largely irrelevant ‘service providers’: he argues that the services the committees provide serve a specific (and important) role to members of the party, and that, in executing this task of brand-building, the national committees have played a crucial role in the creation of parties that share a truly national set of policy preferences.

Selected Recent Publications

"Measuring the Vice-Presidential Home State Advantage With Synthetic Controls." American Politics Research 44, no. 4 (July 2016)

"GOP voters picked Trump. Party leaders aren’t falling in line. Here’s why that’s surprising." (with Jeffery A. Jenkins) The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post, May 10, 2016.

"This research shows that vice presidential candidates actually do win votes in their home states." (with Brenton Peterson) The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post, April 26, 2016.

"The Republicans' Rules Dilemma." The New West, April 24, 2016.

"Bernie Sanders thinks the Democratic primary process ‘distorts reality.’ Does history back this up?" (with Jeffery A. Jenkins) The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post, April 17, 2016.

Nicole Hemmer - History, Columbia University

Project: Messengers of the Right: Media and Modern American Conservatism

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Silvio Waisbord, George Washington University

Nicole Hemmer is Assistant Professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

She works in the Presidential Recordings Program, transcribing and analyzing White House tapes from the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. Since completing her fellowship at the Miller Center in 2009, Hemmer has taught U.S. political history at Manchester University and the University of Miami. She was also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in 2011-12, and is currently a research associate there. Hemmer's work as a historian bridges the divide between academia and the public. She has written about politics and history for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times, and is a weekly contributor to U.S. News & World Report. Her book, Messengers of the Right, a history of conservative media, will be published by Penn Press in August 2016. She recently launched a new history podcast, Past Present. Having worked in a number of different capacities as a scholar, Hemmer returned to the Miller Center to continue building a career as a scholar who, through writing, broadcasting, and research, brings historical insights to contemporary debates about American politics and culture.

Selected Recent Publications

Hemmer writes about politics and history as a weekly contributor to U.S. News & World Report.

"The Dealers and the Darling: Conservative Media and the Candidacy of Barry Goldwater," in Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, ed. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

Robert Henderson - University of Maryland

Project: “Dream Deregulated: The Transformation of Housing Finance, 1968–1985”

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Matthew Lassiter, University of Michigan

Robert Henderson is a writer and analyst at Sage Computing.

His dissertation sheds light on the historical roots of a most vexing current political and economic dilemma – the deregulation of America’s housing markets. While many scholars have explored the political ideology of suburbanization, Henderson pushes the field in new directions by investigating the financial and regulatory mechanisms underpinning the markets themselves. His dissertation is titled “Dream Deregulated: The Transformation of Housing Finance, 1968-1985.”

Peter Henne - Government, Georgetown University

Project: Varieties of Hesitation: Religious Politics and US-Muslim Counterterrorism Cooperation

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: John Owen, University of Virginia

Peter Henne is Assistant Professor of Political Science

Peter Henne is currently assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. Henne's research and teaching focus on the Middle East and global religious politics. He is particularly interested in the different ways states restrict or support religion, and what effect this has on their international and domestic politics. His first book—which will be published by Cambridge University Press—analyzes how Muslim states' relationship with Islam affects their counterterrorism policies; the study includes a large-n statistical analysis as well as in-depth case studies of Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates

Henne received his PhD in Governemnt from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College. Henne's dissertation analyzes the effects of religion on Muslim states’ cooperation with U.S.-led counter-terrorism initiatives. Muslim responses to US counter-terrorism initiatives—both before and after 9/11—have been marked by both significant religiously-influenced opposition among Muslim societies and general cooperation on the part of Muslim states. At the same time, there has been great variation in the extent of Muslim states’ cooperation, and occasional periods of tension between the United States and Muslim states. Peter points to debates over the proper role of religion in society and the political and institutional conditions of religion in Muslim states to explain these patterns of opposition and cooperation. In response to religious-secular divide in recent decades, some Muslim states have established close ties to religious groups over recent decades, granting these groups disproportionate political power and giving the state an incentive to adopt religiously-motivated policies. Others have allied with secular groups, and maintained some autonomy from religious groups. When the former domestic situation coincides with a religiously-contentious international issue—like the American-led “Global War on Terror”—religious groups gain influence over the state’s foreign policy. This can result in tensions over US counter-terrorism initiatives. The latter group of states, in contrast, can insulate their foreign policy from domestic religious politics. Peter’s dissertation includes a quantitative study of counter-terrorism cooperation and case studies of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. 

Peter Henne was the lead researcher for a report the Pew Research Center released in February 2015. The report analyzes trends in government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion around the world. He has made several media appearances to promote the report, including on NPR's All Things Considered.

Selected Recent Publications

"Pew Study On Religion Finds Increased Harassment Of Jews." interview by Tom Gjelten, All Things Considered, NPR, February 26, 2015.

"Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities." Pew Research FactTank, February 26, 2015.

"A look at the damage governments inflict on religious property." Pew Research FactTank, July 10, 2014.

"How Religious Harassment Varies by region Across the Globe." with Angelina Theodorou, Pew Research FactTank, May 2, 2014.

Stefan Heumann - University of Pennsylvania, Political Science

Project: The Tutelary Empire: State- and Nation-Building in the 19th Century U.S.

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Richard White, Stanford University

Stefan Heumann is the Deputy Program Director of the "European Digital Agenda" at The New Responsibility Foundation in Berlin.

Heumann's research interests include imperialism, the politics of U.S. state expansion, and American political development.

Heumann used a historical-institutionalist approach in his dissertation, locating the origins of key U.S. institutions in British imperial policies in North America and tracing their development throughout the 19th century. He argued that state-building, understood as the establishment of governing authority as well as the construction and expansion of administrative capacity and bureaucratic autonomy, is distinguished from nation-building, the process of inclusion and exclusion of diverse populations within the polity. The concept of tutelage, Heumann stated, captures the approach of the U.S. government to populations who were subjected to U.S. governing authority without sharing the political rights, protections, and privileges of those residing within one of the states of the Union.

Derek S. Hoff - History, University of Virginia

Project: Are We Too Many?: The Political Economy of Population in the Twentieth-Century United States

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Michael Bernstein, Tulane University

Derek S. Hoff is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah.

Hoff's research interests include the role of natural monopoly theory in the rise of the regulation of the telephone industry in the 19th century, development of inheritance tax, and the history of income inequality across industrialized nations.

Hoff's dissertation discussed a history of the population debate in the modern United States. In particular, it focused on the subset of that debate that focuses on the interrelationship between demography and the economy. Most histories of "population" in America center on cultural and ethnic questions such as the early-century eugenics movement and the nation's recurrent anti-immigrationism. Hoff's study returned the economic-demographic debate to the center of not only the course of population thought and policy, but also the larger American political economy. 

Selected Recent Publications

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

“The False Alarm over U.S. Fertility." New York Times, April 16, 2013.

Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, The Contract Clause, and the Great Depression. with John Fliter (University Press of Kansas, 2012).

“A Modest Proposal for a New Population Debate." Need to Know, PBS, July 2012.

Benjamin Holtzman - History, Brown University

Project: Crisis and Confidence: Reimagining New York City in the Late Twentieth Century

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Suleiman Osman, The George Washington University

Crisis and Confidence: Reimagining New York City in the Late Twentieth Century uses the sweeping transformation of post-1960s New York City to understand the broader remaking of the United States in the latter twentieth century. The project begins in the crisis-plagued New York City of the 1960s, the inauguration of more than a decade of widespread economic and political turmoil, and ends with the city’s proclaimed resurgence in the 2000s. During this period, diverse groups of city-dwellers, including grassroots organizations, non-profit foundations, elites, and elected officials worked to reshape New York as overlapping crises disrupted long-standing logics of urban governance and economics. In chronicling these varied initiatives, Crisis and Confidence reveals a defining characteristic of the period: as different sectors simultaneously embraced the sentiment that city government no longer worked, many turned toward market-based governing logics to sustain key areas of city life. These turns illustrate the powerful connection between local conditions and the broader shift toward a marketized political economy.

Shelley L. Hurt - Political Science, The New School for Social Research

Project: Institutionalizing Food Power: U.S. Foreign Policy, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Agricultural Biotechnology Industry, 1972–1994

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Ronnie Lipschutz, University of California, Santa Cruz

Shelley L. Hurt is Assistant Professor of Political Science Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Hurt teaches courses on Biological and Chemical Arms Control and Development, Security Studies in Global Perspective, Science, Technology, Power and Politics, War, Trade, and American Political development. Her research interests include U.S. foreign policy, science and technology policy, security studies, international law and organizations, globalization, and American political development.

Hurt's dissertation investigated U.S. policymakers' use of the market and law, domestically and internationally, to foster a favorable climate for the agricultural biotechnology industry. She hypothesized that this state strategy evolved in response to declining U.S. hegemony in the early 1970s when the pressure of international competition became a paramount concern for U.S. officials. Subsequently, food came to be seen as a fundamental national resource with the potential to propel the U.S. back into an undisputed hegemonic position. She argued that in response to this geopolitical pressure, U.S. policymakers and courts enacted a complex set of legal rules and regulations to create the conditions for this industry to flourish. The culmination of these domestic policies led to U.S. insistence on incorporating the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Selected Recent Publications

Hybrid Rule and State Formation: Public-Private Power in the 21st Century. with Ronnie D. Lipschutz, eds. (Routledge Press, 2015)

"Military's Hidden Hand: Understanding the Origins of Biotechnology in the American Context, 1969-1972." in State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development, Fred Block and Matthew Keller, eds (Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2011).

Elizabeth Ingleson - History, University of Sydney

Project: The End of Isolation: Rapprochement, Globalisation, and American Trade with China, 1972-1979

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Thomas Borstelmann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Elizabeth Ingleson is a history PhD student at both the University of Sydney and the United States Studies Centre. Elizabeth’s research examines the origins of the contemporary trade relationship between the United States and China. Beginning in 1972—when President Nixon and Chairman Mao ended over twenty years of economic and political isolation—she explores how the new trade relationship was re-established and became part of the politics of rapprochement.

She explores businesspeople as crucial agents of diplomacy, looking at the American trade culture that developed, and applying cultural and business history methodologies to the diplomatic history of rapprochement. Additionally, she explores the American political ideas about trade with China, which assumed burgeoning trade ties would assist the rapprochement process by creating mutual interests from which political negotiations could develop. This reflected the 1970s context in which the notion of interdependence became a key idea in American foreign policy: an idea that was in many ways a precursor to that of globalization.

Her research raises questions about the relationships between politics, economics, culture and business in America. She argues that even though America’s trade with China in the 1970s was important politically, by the end of the decade rather than shaping the politics of rapprochement the reverse became true. The trade between the two countries was instead substantially influenced by political considerations—none more so than the political desire for interdependence.

The historical experience of the 1970s shows the nuances in the contemporary correlation made between trade and peace in Sino-American relations. Rather than a linear dynamic, politics deeply influenced trade, highlighting the key role that deliberate cultivation and political willpower played in supporting and encouraging what is today the world’s most important trade relationship.

Selected Recent Publications

"History lessons from China for future relations with Cuba." The Conversation, February 11, 2015.

Alethia Jones - Political Science, Yale University

Project: Bootstraps and Beltways: The State's Role in Immigrant Self-Help

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Mark Stern, University of Pennsylvania

Alethia Jones is Director of Education and Leadership Development at 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

Jones' research and teaching fields are urban studies and community development; the public policy process; race, ethnicity and politics; and, historical political science.

Jones' dissertation examined the politics surrounding informal immigrant financial practices to understand the relationship between state power and self-help in immigrant incorporation. The three cases Jones studied come from the two periods of highest immigration and permit us to see continuities from the past as well as account for different racial and political contexts. She additionally added an institutional dimension to the story of how politics affects the incorporation of immigrants. Unlike other studies that reinforce the classic "up by their bootstraps" immigrant, self-help story, this project specified the structure of the relationship between informal and formal institutions and the state.

Selected Recent Publications

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, ed. with Virginia Eubanks (SUNY Press, 2014).

"Identity Politics: Part of a Reinvigorated Class Politics." New Labor Forum, November 5, 2010.

Christopher Jones - History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

Project: Energy Highways: Canals, Pipes, and Wires Transform the Mid-Atlantic

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: John McNeill, Georgetown University

Christopher Jones is Assistant Professor of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

Jones is a historian of energy, technology, and environment who studies how we have come to use and depend on fossil fuel energy sources and how these decisions have changed the ways we live, work, and play. 

Jone's dissertation argued that energy transporters occupied a central position between producers and consumers and actively shaped the mid-Atlantic's energy history through choices about how canals, pipes, and wires were built, how they were operated, and where they went. His project consisted of three sections analyzing the transportation and consumption of coal (1820–1860), oil (1860–1900) and electricity (1900–1930). In his work, Jones drew on and integrated the insights of historians of technology, energy, industrialization, regional development, and the environment. He additionally highlighted the social effects of the transportation of energy and included social policy implications.

Selected Recent Publications

Christopher Jones is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014).

David Karpf - University of Pennsylvania

Project: Network-Enhanced Goods and Internet-Mediated Organizations: The Internet's Effects on Political Participation, Organization, and Mobilization

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Henry Farrell, George Washington University

David Karpf is Assistant Professor of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.

Karpf's work focuses on strategic communication practices of political associations in America, with a particular interest in Internet-related strategies.

Karpf's dissertation argued that the Internet is enabling new forms of political association, engaging geographically diffuse communities-of-interest in a host of participatory activities that were infeasible under previous information regimes. He discussed how this is leading to the emergence of internet-mediated organizations that take advantage of the online environment to construct novel solutions to traditional collective action problems. Karpf studied three organizations in particular – the network of progressive bloggers, MoveOn.org, and Dean/Democracy for America – that have each earned significant mainstream media attention for their impact on American politics, but have yet to receive academic analysis. Karpf offered detailed analyses of these organizations, discussed their significance to American politics, and considered their likely implications for interest group mobilization.

In 2009, Karpf earned his Ph.D in Political Science from UPenn. Immediately, he began expanding the findings of his dissertation to author his first book, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, published in May 2012 by Oxford University Press.

Selected Recent Publications

The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (2012, Oxford University Press).

Nicole Kazee - Political Science, Yale University

Project: Wal-Mart Welfare?: The Role of Low-Wage Employers in American Antipoverty Policy

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Lawrence Brown

Nicole Kazee is Director of Health Policy and Programs for the Office of the Vice President for Health Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Kazee monitors federal, state, and local health policy changes that impact the university’s clinical operations; analyzes and communicates to internal and external audiences their potential impacts; and provides strategic guidance for university leadership on how policy affects operations, revenue streams, and other aspects of health system practice. She also provides programmatic leadership for initiatives related to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, including building care coordination models, developing a community health assessment, and applying for federal and state grants and contracts. 

Kazee's dissertation explored how antipoverty programs have increasingly helped low-income workers and their families. This change expanded the relevant interest group community to include employers and their organizations, which have a new stake in the type and generosity of government policies that are used to support the poor. Second, policymaking authority has devolved to the states, which increasingly make decisions about which policies to enact and who will be eligible for them – and vary widely in these choices. This project asked why some states offer greater work support than others, and why particular policies are chosen over the alternatives. Most importantly, the project emphasized the role of employers in policy choices, determining the conditions under which the business community will shape antipoverty policies and the nature of its influence.

To answer these questions, her dissertation created an original scale of Work Support in all 50 states, looking primarily at three very different policy areas: Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, state minimum wages, and state earned income tax credits. A quantitative analysis considered a wide range of variables that could potentially explain these state policy outcomes, and identified broad patterns across states. Finally, three states are studied in depth through media analyses, the examination of government documents, and, most importantly, numerous personal interviews. These case studies captured the more subtle, contextual elements of policymaking that ultimately shape state outcomes.

Selected Recent Publications

"Tax Can Help Workers, Employers." The State, May 7, 2008.

Zane Kelly - Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

Project: Finance at War: Debt, Borrowing, and Conflict

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Erik Gartzke, University of California, San Diego

Zane Kelly is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington.

Kelly's areas of specialization include international relations, comparative politics, and political methodology.

In his dissertation, Kelly argued that the foreign policy options available to states are strongly conditioned by their financial circumstances and relationships. Sovereign debt and access to international credit influence the range of choices available to even the most powerful nations; yet international relations literature largely overlooks the impact of finance on state behavior. War finance involves strategic choices between taxes and debt, and between international and domestic creditors. By making government accountable to a diverse international constituency, borrowing abroad allows leaders to sidestep the conventional relationship between taxpayers and government.

His dissertation contributed to existing literature in three ways: by offering an alternative explanation for peace among nations; by expanding regime characteristics to include variation in credit-worthiness; and by enlarging state-capacity beyond taxation and domestic elements. Kelley argued that as the ratio between wartime demand for capital relative to domestic capacity increases, so does the likelihood that states will seek foreign investment during wartime. He then explored four main conclusions: first, states that are able to raise money through sovereign debt will be more likely to engage in conflicts and international borrowing is more likely to precede major wars; second, controlling for other measures of state capacity, overall higher levels of sovereign debt will act as a constraint on belligerent leaders; third, mutual holdings of debt will make states less likely to engage in conflict with one another; fourth, changing terms of foreign loans reflect both the likelihood of interstate war and the probability that one side will prevail over another.

Ronald Krebs - Political Science, University of Washington

Project: A School for the Nation? Military Institutions and the Boundaries of Nationality

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Elizabeth Kier, University of Washington

Ronald Krebs is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

Krebs was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor for 2006–2008. He has been awarded research fellowships by the Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellows Program at the University of Texas at Austin, the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Krebs conducts research at the juncture of international relations and comparative politics, with a particular interest in the consequences of war and military service. Krebs has recently begun a major research project exploring the effects of war on democratic institutions and processes. His book, Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship, explores the conditions under which and the mechanisms through which military participation policies shape contestation over citizenship rights. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003.

Krebs' dissertation, "A School for the Nation? Military Institutions and the Boundaries of Nationality," explored the political consequences of patterns of military inclusion and exclusion in several historical and national contexts, including the United States, Israel, and imperial Germany. In it, Krebs surveyed the political legacy of the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, including a case study of African-Americans' military service in the 20th century which explained why black claims-making premised upon military service failed to move white audiences after World War I.

Selected Recent Publications

Narrative and the Making of US National Security. (Cambridge University Press, August 2015)

"Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy." ed. with Stacie E. Goddard. Special issue of Security Studies. 24, no. 1 (January-March 2015).

In War's Wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy. Edited with Elizabeth Kier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Sarah Kreps - Government, Georgetown University

Project: Power, Arms, and Allies: U.S. Multilateralism in an Age of Unipolarity

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Jeffrey Legro, University of Virginia

Sarah Kreps is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and the co-director of the Cornell Law School International Law-International Relations Colloquium.

Kreps' research focuses on issues of international security, particularly questions of conflict and cooperation, alliance politics, political economy, and nuclear proliferation. Current projects examine the effect of war on domestic institutions; the ethics of conflict; and the relationship between financial costs of war and democratic accountability.

Her dissertation asked: Why does the unipolar power often intervene multilaterally when it has the capacity to act alone? What explains the variation between the broad multilateralism associated with interventions such as the first Gulf War and, conversely, cases in which the U.S. is more willing to exercise its freedom of action and intervene more unilaterally, as in the 2003 Iraq war? Kreps's dissertation addressed these questions through a combination of theoretical and empirical work on U.S.-led interventions since 1945. Kreps discussed the role of domestic politics, normative constraints, international structure, and the "shadow of the future" on U.S. decisions to intervene multilaterally when a unilateral option is available. Ultimately, her research explained why and under what conditions the hegemony intervenes multilaterally against a weaker adversary and when the U.S. privileges unilateral approaches to intervention.

Selected Recent Publications

Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2011).

"The Next Drone Wars: Preparing for Profileration." Foreign Affairs, March/April 2014.

"Ground the Drones? The Real Problem with Unmanned Aircraft." Foreign Affairs, 4 December 2013.

"Political Parties at War: A Study of American War Finance, 1789-2010." with Gustavos Flores-Macias, American Political Science Review 107, No. 4 (November 2013): 833-848.

Katherine Krimmel - Politics, Princeton University

Project: Special Interest Partisanship: The Transformation of American Political Parties

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: Nolan McCarty, Princeton University

Katherine Krimmel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College.

Krimmel specializes in American Politics where her research analyzes democratic representation in the United States from several angles.  Her book project, Picking Sides: Group-Party Linkages in Postwar America, analyzes changes in the relationship between political parties and special interest groups since the New Deal.  She also have two other projects examining the relationship between public opinion and different political outcomes.  The first, co-authored with Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips, analyzes opinion and representation on gay rights issues.  The second, co-authored with Kelly Rader, investigates why the states most opposed to federal spending tend to receive disproportionately large amounts of federal money.

Selected Recent Publications

"Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)Representation." Public Opinion Quarterly (August 20, 2014)

Nora Krinitsky - History, University of Michigan

Project: The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles

“The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America,” examines the building of the American coercive state from the end of World War I through the early post-World War II years, with particular attention to the entwined processes of criminalization and racialization in the urban North. Chicago serves as the site of analysis, and offers an ideal site through which to consider many of the pivotal transformations in modern American history and their relationship to crime control—including urban expansion, migrations and immigrations, tensions between labor and capital, Prohibition and the temperance movement, industrial boom and economic crisis. The dissertation augments the burgeoning historical literature on the American carceral state, and demonstrates that in order to understand the vast scope of modern coercive state power, scholars must consider the dense legal terrain of American cities, and account for the considerable power wielded by local policing institutions to define the boundaries of legality. The dissertation weaves together analyses of these state institutions, as well as their critics and members of policed communities, drawing on municipal, state, and federal government records, legal treatises and legislative debates, commission investigations, news reports, and the records of social reform and racial improvement organizations. Policing thus serves as a lens through which to understand the production of racial knowledge, the relationship between citizens and the coercive state, and the negotiation of rights in the modern United States. 

Walter Ladwig - International Relations, Oxford University

Project: Assisting Counterinsurgents: U.S. Security Assistance and Internal War, 1946–1991

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Daniel Byman, Georgetown University

Walter Ladwig is Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London.

Ladwig's research interests include international security and foreign policy, defense politics, military strategy and operations, counterinsurgency, and the political and military implications of India’s emergence as great power. His work has appeared in International Security, Asian Survey, Comparative Strategy, Asian Security, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Military Review, Strategic Insights, War in History, and Joint Force Quarterly, in addition to half-a-dozen chapters in edited volumes. He has commented on international affairs for the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and the New York Times and his commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the Indian Express.

Ladwig's dissertation explored U.S. efforts to assist allied nations in counterinsurgency, with a specific focus on the use of American aid to induce political and economic reform, as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. He argued that insurgency is primarily a political phenomenon, and as such, any response to it must be primarily political as well. The cases Ladwig studied in his project suggest that the U.S. must gain sufficient leverage to compel the local ally to adopt the reforms and policy changes necessary to overcome the insurgency. The preliminary hypothesis of his study was that the sequencing of aid is the key factor in successfully encouraging needed reform.

Selected Recent Publications

“Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia.” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, No. 4 (2015).

“Diego Garcia: Anchoring America’s Future Presence in the Indo-Pacific.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 15, No. 2 (Summer 2013)

"The Forgotten Force: Police-Building in Iraq and Afghanistan." World Politics Review, May 2013.

“A Neo-Nixon Doctrine for the Indian Ocean: Helping States Help Themselves.” Strategic Analysis, (May 2012)

Kyle M. Lascurettes - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: Orders of Exclusion: The Strategic Sources of International Orders and Great Power Ordering

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: John Ikenberry, Princeton University

Kyle Lascurettes is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College.

Lascurettes received his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia in 2012.  His research is in the areas of international security and international organization, and his interests include the strategic use of ideas in international relations, psychology and world politics, the intersection of trade and interstate conflict, and how states and statesmen learn from history in global affairs.

Lascurettes' dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association Kenneth N. Waltz Prize for best dissertation in the field of international security and arms control.  The project sought to explain the preferences of great powers for establishing or reestablishing order in the international system, here defined as a set of established, foundational rules accepted by a significant number of important actors at a given time. He argues that powerful states most often advocate visions of order that will weaken or discredit the entity they find most threatening to their preferred vision of order, be it another powerful state, an ideological movement or a transnational network. If successful, they are thus able to create an order premised on weakening, opposing and above all excluding this threat from reaping the benefits of stable international order. The project is macro-historical in scope and analyzes a broad set of cases to elucidate general patterns of preferences for order from the advent of the modern state system through the American Century to the present.

Christopher J. Lebron - Political Science, Massachusetts institute of Technology

Project: Power, Race, History and Justice in America

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Kwame Appiah, New York University

Christopher J. Lebron is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at Yale University

Lebron's general interests are in issues of social justice, and political theory methodology. 

His dissertation put forth a conception of justice termed democratic partnership developed for the purpose of addressing extant racial injustices in American society. He began from the premise that significant patterns of injustice in any society can only be understood, hence properly addressed, when we consider the development of the injustice over the course of a specified historical period. Further, any resulting injustice importantly centered on those aspects of social existence which undermine one's ability to partake and benefit from that society's resources and political life – he offered that this is the ability to have a sufficient amount of self-respect. Historically grounded injustices are best addressed, so he argued, by a normative theory informed by a robust conception of power, which he termed historically evolved socially embedded power. To give context to the claims of justice and this conception of power, he sought to provide a relevant political historical narrative focusing on the relations of power between major social, political, and economic institutions and persons of color and which considers the broader impact on society over time. Democratic partnerships are only fulfilled when the appropriate institutions take on the stipulated responsibilities while persons of color utilize the social bases of self-respect in order to be substantive equal members of democratic society.

Selected Recent Publications

The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (Oxford University Press, July 2013).

“What, To the Black American, Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?” New York Times Opinionator-The Stone, January 18, 2015.

Caroline Lee - Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Project: Compromising Natures: Moral Economies of Environmental Decision Making

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Mark Landy, Boston College

Caroline Lee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College.

Lee is a comparative institutional sociologist with research and teaching interests in the following areas: political sociology, social movements, economic sociology, law and society, sociology of knowledge and culture, urban and environmental sociology, and research methods. Her work is located in the broader multidisciplinary field of American political development.

Lee's dissertation explored obstacles to civic engagement in local environmental politics. Lee compared a spectrum of conservation decision-making bodies in three different U.S. communities to find that the devolved public deliberation formats heralded by researchers over the last 10 years have in fact encouraged Balkanization and allegations of exclusion. On the other hand, informal partnerships between national environmental organizations and local elites have brokered unlikely alliances that involve reluctant stakeholders in habitat restoration, even in politically conservative communities. These public-private partnerships, which Lee called "conservation machines," increase participation by minimizing contention with local growth networks and generating manifold opportunities for public input. Lee hypothesized that the national environmental interest groups that critics malign as out of touch with the grassroots have played important backstage roles encouraging power sharing on the ground in select communities. She argued that these outcomes suggest that political theorists should reconsider the idealization of deliberation and the presumed sources of civic alienation.

Selected Recent Publications

Do-it-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry. (Oxford University Press, 2015)

ed. with Michael McQuarrie, and Edward T. Walke Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation. (New York: NYU Press, 2015)

"Democracy's New Discipline: Public Deliberation as Organizational Strategy." with Zachary Romano, Organization Studies 34, no. 5-6 (April 22, 2013):733-753.

"Hard Times, Hard Choices': Marketing Retrenchment as Civic Empowerment in an Era of Neoliberal Crisis." with Kelly McNulty and Sarah Shaffer, Socio-Economic Review 11, no. 1, (September 21, 2012):81-106.

Heather Lewis - History, New York University

Project: Scaling Down: Half a Century of Community Control in New York City's Schools, 1945–95

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Martha Biondi, Northwestern University

Heather Lewis is Associate Professor of Art and Design Education at the Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design.

Lewis’s teaching and research integrate the history of education, art and design, and urban development through the prism of New York City’s urban communities and their changes over time.

The community control movement in education was part of a multi-pronged movement targeting housing, employment, healthcare, policing and welfare in many of New York City's African-American, Puerto Rican, and Asian communities of the late 1960s. While the movement for community control of schools paralleled and intersected with organizing in other fields, it had a distinct trajectory and a unique set of outcomes because of the role public education is supposed to play in producing the conditions for citizen participation in democratic governance.

Spanning a half-century in New York City's school system (1945–95), Lewis interpreted the historical trajectory of multiple efforts to scale up educational reform by scaling down governance and bureaucracy. Her dissertation claimed that improvement was possible because educators and school board members in these decentralized districts were driven by a similar moral commitment to societal and school change as were the community control activists in the 1960s. Given the limitations of the school system's decentralized structure, a downturn in the local and national economy, and the continued resistance of the teachers' and principals' unions to community control, local district leaders' accomplishments in the '70s and '80s were significant. Lewis's dissertation posited that while the continuity of leadership and improvement in educational outcomes in these districts may not have been representative of the 32 community school districts created under decentralization, the districts' broader social and political contexts were not atypical. Rather than treating the two districts as idiosyncratic, her dissertation argued that other New York City community school districts with similar student populations and committed leadership could have followed a different course if there had been more effective support from the central school system, teachers' and principals' unions, elected officials and the public.

Selected Recent Publications

New York City’s Public Schools From Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and its Legacy (Teachers College Press, 2013).

“Future Teachers and Historical Habits of Mind: A Pedagogical Case Study.” History of Education Quarterly, 56, no. 2 (February, 2016)

“Assessment by Design: Scaling up by Thinking Small.” in Reframing Quality Assurance in Creative Disciplines (2015): 107-116.

Adam Liff - Politics, Princeton University

Project: Shadowing the Hegemon? National Identity, Global Norms, and the Military Trajectories of Rising Powers

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Alastair Johnston, Harvard University

Adam Liff is Assistant Professor of East Asian International Relations in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University.

Professor Liff also serves as an Associate-in-Research at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His primary disciplinary fields of academic inquiry are international relations and security studies with a particular focus on contemporary security affairs in the Asia-Pacific region. Liff’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in International Security, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, and The China Quarterly, and he has been cited widely in global media, including in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and The Economist. Other recent publications include several book chapters in edited volumes and articles published or forthcoming in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Asahi Shimbun, Asan Forum, The National Interest, The Diplomat, PacNet, and Asia-Pacific Bulletin. Professor Liff holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University and a B.A. from Stanford University.

Liff’s dissertation sought to develop a general theory of great power emergence by explaining variation in the military trajectories of rising powers in the modern era, past and present. By analyzing data gathered on seven cases of rising powers, including during eighteen months of field work in mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, Liff argued against the prevailing materialist conventional wisdom that rising powers’ major strategic choices are in all cases shaped primarily by shrewd calculations of the state’s economic and security interests. Rather, he shows that in many cases of historical and theoretical significance, non-material variables—above all, national identity and prevailing contemporaneous global norms of appropriate ‘great power’ behavior—have powerful and independent effects on rising powers’ decisions about military policy.

Selected Recent Publications

"Whither the Balancers? The Case for a Methodological Reset.” Security Studies 25, no. 3 (2016)

"Installing a Safety on the ‘Loaded Gun’? China’s institutional reforms, National Security Commission and Sino–Japanese crisis (in)stability." Journal of Contemporary China 25, no. 98 (2016)

“Japan’s Defense Policy: Abe the Evolutionary.” The Washington Quarterly, July 31, 2015.

"Japan-China Crisis Management–the Urgent Need for Air-Sea Contact Mechanism." The Asahi Shimbun July 9, 2015.

Eric Lomazoff - Government, Harvard University

Project: The Life and Death of the Hydra-Headed Monster: Antebellum Bank Regulation and American State Development, 1781–1836

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

Eric Lomazoff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University.

Lomazoff's dissertation engaged the long, discontinuous, and tortured life of the Bank of the United States (1791–1811 and 1816–1836), the lynchpin of Federalist political economy which grew into a regulatory role vis-a-vis state-chartered commercial banks. Lomazoff used this neglected policy instrument of the Early Republic to address both micro- and macro-level themes within the broad literature on institutional development. A focus on multiple short-run episodes in the life of the Bank – its creation, conversion, postwar resurrection, and demise – permits the testing of standing disciplinary hypotheses concerning institutional choice, change, reproduction, and decline. By contrast, zooming out from these discrete historical moments presents an opportunity to evaluate early, if failed, national state-building efforts over the long durée. That is, the Bank's protracted and uneven career begs for a chronicle of antebellum financial state development and the forces which explain its sharp vicissitudes over time. Lomazoff argued that we may learn just as much about the early state of "court and parties" from the institutions which died away as from those which persistently organized antebellum American politics.

Selected Recent Publications

"Symmetry and Repetition: Patterns in the History of the Bank of the United States." in Randall Parker and Robert Whaples, eds., Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History (New York: Routledge, 2013): 3-14. 
"Turning (Into) 'The Great Regulating Wheel': The Conversion of the Bank of the United States, 1791-1811." Studies in American Political Development 26, no. 1 (April 2012): 1-23. 
"Speak (Again), Memory: Rethinking the Scope of Congressional Power in the Early American Republic." Tulsa Law Review 47, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 87-98. 
"Approval Regulation and Endogenous Consumer Confidence: Theory and Analogies to Licensing, Safety, and Financial Regulation." with Daniel Carpenter and Justin Grimmer, Regulation & Governance 4, no. 4 (December 2010): 383-407.

Chris Loss - Higher Education and History, University of Virginia

Project: From Democracy to Diversity: The Transformation of American Higher Education from World War I through the Cold War

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Julie Reuben, Harvard University

Chris Loss is an assistant professor in diplomatic/transnational history at Ohio State University. Previously he was an associate professor of public policy and higher education and professor of history in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University.

Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University, Loss was a research fellow in the Governance Studies Program at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He also worked in academic administration for four years in the Office of the Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia. Loss holds doctorates in higher education and in history from the University of Virginia.

Professor Loss specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on the social, political, and policy history of American higher education. He has most recently co-edited a publication with former Miller Center fellow, Patrick McGuinn, a publication, The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education (2016.) His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History, Social Science History, the History of Education Quarterly, and the Journal of the History of Psychology, among others. From 2010-12 Loss was a fellow on the Teagle Foundation’s National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. In 2012-13 Loss was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Presently, Loss is working on a new book project, Front and Center: Academic Expertise and its Challengers in the Post-1945 United States, which explores the rise of interdisciplinary centers and the growing jurisdiction of experts in U.S. politics and public policy in modern America.

Selected Recent Publications

Can Endowments Save Higher Education? (HistPhil)

The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2016)

Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2011).

“The Institutionalization of In Loco Parentis after Gott v. Berea College (1913).” Teachers College Record 16, no. 12 (December 2014)

"The Land-Grant Colleges, Cooperative Extension, and the New Deal."in Roger L. Geiger and Nathan M. Sorber, eds. Perspectives on the History of Higher Education: The Land-Grant Colleges and the Reshaping of American Higher Education 30 (2013): 285-310.

"From Pluralism to Diversity: Reassessing the Political Uses of the Uses of the University." Social Science History 35, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 525-49.

Stephen Macekura - History, University of Virginia

Project: Of Limits and Growth: Environmentalism and the Rise of 'Sustainable Development' in the Twentieth Century

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: John McNeill, Georgetown University

Stephen Macekura is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2013, and then was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute, where he continues to serve as the associate director of the Program on Culture, Capitalism, and Global Change.

Macekura's scholarly work explores the history of the United States in the world, global environmental history, and the history of political economy. Other interests include the history of international development, civil society, and human rights.

Macekura is currently at work on two book-length projects. The first is a book manuscript entitled Of Limits and Growth: Global Environmentalism and the Rise of ‘Sustainable Development’ in the Twentieth Century under contract with Cambridge University Press. The book chronicles the tensions between economic growth, modernization, and environmental protection worldwide from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. In particular, it charts the rise and evolution of international environmentalism as environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) struggled to implement environmental protection measures in the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s and then critiqued and reformed the development approaches of the U.S. government, World Bank, and UN system in the 1970s and 1980s. The second is a book-length project that explores various critiques of “economic growth” since the 1960s by revealing how reformers have challenged and sought to rethink the ways in which the concept of “growth” has been measured.
His writing has been published by Cold War History, The Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, and The Hedgehog Review.

Selected Recent Publications

“Development and Economic Growth: An Intellectual History,” in Iris Borowy and Matthias Schmelzer, eds. History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2017).
“Crisis and Opportunity: Environmental NGOs, Debt-for-Nature Swaps, and the Rise of ‘People-Centered’ Conservation,” Environment and History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (February 2016), 49-74.

Of Limits and Growth: Global Environmentalism and the Rise of ‘Sustainable Development’ in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

“Our Mis-Leading Indicators.” PublicBooks, September 15, 2014.

Sean L. Malloy - History, Stanford University

Project: Henry L. Stimson and the American Foreign Policy Tradition

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Timothy Naftali, New York University

Sean Malloy is Associate Professor of History at University of California, Merced.

Malloy's research interests include the study of war and morality, particularly with respect to the targeting of civilians in wartime. Most recently, Malloy's work has focused on the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japanese cities and civilians in August 1945. 

Malloy's dissertation, "Henry L. Stimson and the American Foreign Policy Tradition," focused on the former Secretary of War's conceptions of international relations and political economy and their contribution to the development of American foreign policy in the 20th century. He also examined the variety of methods that Stimson sought to employ in order to ensure the level of international stability that he believed necessary for American security. Malloy focused particularly on Stimson's link between the growth of American trade and the propagation of democracy and peace, both in the developed and developing world.

Selected Recent Publications

Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008).

"Liberal Democracy and the Lure of Bombing in the Interwar United States." in Bruce Schulman, ed., Making the American Century: Studies in 20th Century Culture, Politics, and Economy. (Oxford University Press, 2014): 109-123. 

"Uptight in Babylon: Eldridge Cleaver's Cold War." Diplomatic History 37, no. 3 (June 2013): 538-571.

"'A Very Pleasant Way to Die': Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan." Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012): 515-545.

Oriana Skylar Mastro - Politics, Princeton University

Project: Settling the Score: The Interactive Effect of Fighting and Bargaining on War Duration and Termination

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: Dan Reiter, Emory University

Oriana Skylar Mastro is an assistant professor of security studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also the 2016-2017 Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Mastro also serves as officer in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a Political Military Affairs Strategist at PACAF. Previously, Dr. Mastro was a fellow in the Asia-Pacific Security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a University of Virginia Miller Center National Fellow and a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum Sasakawa Peace Fellow. Additionally, she has worked on China policy issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, RAND Corporation, U.S. Pacific Command, and Project 2049. Highly proficient in Mandarin, she also worked at a Chinese valve-manufacturing firm in Beijing as a translator and has made appearances on a Chinese-language debate show. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D in Politics from Princeton University.

Her current research is focused on: coercive diplomacy, military transparency, U.S. military posture in Asia, Chinese military modernization, patterns in Chinese foreign policy, and the effects of economic liberalism in Asia. She is working on a book manuscript that evaluates the conditions under which leaders offer peace talks during wars.

Selected Recent Publications

 "A Global Expeditionary People’s Liberation Army: 2025-2030." in The Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 2025. ed. Roy Kamphausen and David Lai. Carlisle (PA: U.S. Army War College, 2015), 207-234

"China's Military is About to Go Global." The National Interest, December 18, 2014.

"Why Chinese Assertiveness is Here to Stay." The Washington Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2014): 151-170.

"The Problems with the Liberal Peace in Asia," Survival 56 (2014): 129-158.

Aila Matanock - Political Science, Stanford University

Project: International Insurance: Explaining Why Militant Groups Participate in Elections as Part of a Peace Agreement

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Susan Hyde, University of California, Berkeley

Aila Matanock is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Matanock was previously a visiting Scholar at the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego.  Her research interests include international engagement during and after civil conflict, post-conflict peace-building, state-building, and development. 

Matanock's dissertation focused on the role of electoral competition between militant groups and governments, especially as a component of negotiated settlements.  In contrast to broadly pessimistic views of elections as a conflict resolution tool, her research finds that, when these inclusive elections are part of an agreement, the duration of peace between the signatories is longer. Specifically, international actors are able to engage in monitoring and sanctioning violations of the deal through the transparency that elections provide.  The project draws on evidence from field interviews with former militant group, government, and civic leaders and on a newly collected cross-national dataset.  Her other projects focus on the role of international actors and armed non-state actors in governing weak and post-conflict states.  She has designed and run several survey experiments in Colombia and Mexico that explore the levels of social support for armed non-state actors, as well as their strategies for gaining more support.

Selected Recent Publications

"The Empiricists’ Insurgency.” with Eli Berman, Annual Review of Political Science vol. 18, no 1 (2015)

“Governance Delegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood.” Governance (2014)

Evan D. McCormick - Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

Project: "Between Revolution and Repression: U.S. Foreign Policy and Latin American Democracy, 1980-1989"

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Gilbert Joseph, Yale University

Evan D. McCormick is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

He joined the CPH in August 2015. Evan's research focuses on the history of U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War, with a focus on the intersection of U.S. development policies, Latin American democracy, and human rights. Evan is currently expanding his research and writing interests in presidential and public history through involvement in the CPH's Collective Memory Project, an oral history program that focuses on specific aspects of the administration of George W. Bush.

Before joining SMU, Evan was a dissertation fellow at the Miller Center and an Eisenhower/Roberts Fellow of the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. He was the recipient of the University of Virginia's Albert Gallatin Graduate Research Fellowship and a junior fellow in the University of Virginia Society of Fellows. 

Evan received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2015.

His dissertation, “Beyond Revolution and Repression: U.S. Foreign Policy and Latin American Democracy, 1980-1989,” explored the history of U.S. efforts to promote democracy amidst Latin American civil conflicts during the Reagan years. Evan earned an M.A. in international relations from Yale University (2007) and a B.A. in international relations from Boston University (2003).  Before returning to academia, he served as a policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security where he specialized in U.S.-Latin American security issues. His work has appeared in The Journal of Cold War Studies.

Selected Recent Publications

"Freedom Tide? Ideology, Politics, and the Origins of Democracy Promotion in U.S. Central America Policy, 1980–1984." Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 4 (Fall 2014)

Victor McFarland - History, Yale University

Project: The Oil Crisis of the 1970s: An International History

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: David Painter, Georgetown University

Victor McFarland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri.

His research interests center on oil and the energy industry, along with related topics including the environment, political economy, and U.S. relations with the Middle East. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Originally from North Idaho, Professor McFarland received his B.A. from Stanford University and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University.

McFarland's dissertation examined the changing relationship between the United States and the Middle East during the oil crisis of the 1970s. In that decade, oil prices soared and control over the world's richest petroleum reserves passed from Western-owned companies into the hands of oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia. The project used both American and Arab sources to explore the ways in which the oil crisis affected the American economy, triggered an economic boom in the Arab Gulf, and permanently changed the relationship between the United States and the Middle East.

Selected Recent Publications

Review of Nathan Citino, “The Ghosts of Development: The United States and Jordan’s East Ghor Canal,” Journal of Cold War Studies16:4 (Fall 2014): 159-188, published online by H-Diplo, October 21, 2016

"The Paris Climate Agreement in Historical Perspective." Humanity Journal, December 15, 2015.

"The New International Economic Order, Interdependence, and Globalization." Humanity Journal, March 18, 2015.

Patrick McGuinn - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: The Institutionalization of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2000

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Maris Vinovskis, University of Michigan

Patrick McGuinn is Professor of Political Science and Education at Drew University.

Partick McGuinn has assumed full professorship as Professor of Public Policy and Education at Drew University (Summer 2016). He recently co-edited with former Miller Center fellow, Chris Loss, a publication, The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education with Harvard Education Press (2016.) McGuinn's first book, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005, was honored as a Choice outstanding academic title.  He is also the editor (with Paul Manna) of Education Governance for the 21st Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform.  Patrick has published many academic articles and book chapters and has produced a number of policy reports for the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  He is a regular commentator on education policy and politics in media outlets such as Education Week, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the NJ Star Ledger and was recognized in the top 100 of the Education Week Edu-Scholar rankings for the past three years.  He is a former high school social studies teacher and the father of four daughters in public school.

In his dissertation, "The Institutionalization of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2000," McGuinn argued that the expansion and institutionalization of federal education policy must be understood in the context of the institutional incentives that shape the behavior of political actors in the national government. The development and eventual public acceptance of a powerful equity rationale for federal intervention in education during the 1960s led to the creation of new educational institutions for research, policymaking, and administration at the national level.

Selected Recent Publications

The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2016)

No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005 (University Press of Kansas, 2006)

“The New Politics of Education: Analyzing the Federal Education Policy Landscape in the Post-NCLB Era.” with Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot, Educational Policy 23, no. 1 (2009): 15-42. 

Ajay Mehrotra - History, University of Chicago

Project: Creating the Modern American Fiscal State: The Political Economy of U.S. Tax Policy, 1880–1930

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Elliot Brownlee, University of California, Santa Barbara

Ajay Mehrotra is director of the American Bar Foundation

Ajay K. Mehrotra is currently director of the American Bar Foundation.  He is a legal scholar whose research focuses on the history of American law and political economy, and the relationship between taxation and state formation in historical and comparative contexts.  

Prior to his ABF Directorship, Ajay Mehrotra was Professor of Law and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. From 2012-2015, he also served as the school's associate dean for research. He was also an adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis.  From 2007-2011, he was Co-director (with Michael Grossberg) of the Indiana University Center for Law, Society & Culture.  Mehrotra was previously a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation while completing his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and his B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan. After law school and prior to his graduate training in history, Mehrotra was an associate in the Structured Finance Department in the New York offices of J.P. Morgan.

Mehrotra's writings have appeared in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review.  His scholarship and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Selected Recent Publications

Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

"Charles A. Beard and the Columbia School of Political Economy: Revisiting the Intellectual Roots of the Beardian Thesis." Articles by Maurer Faculty, Paper 1311 (2014)

“From Seligman to Shoup: The Early Columbia School of Taxation and Development.” in W. Elliot Brownlee, Yasunori Fukagai & Eisaku Ide, eds., The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
“From Programmatic Reform to Social Science Research: The National Tax Association and the Promise and Perils of Disciplinary Encounters.” with J. Thorndike, Law & Society Review 45, no. 3 (2011): 593-630.

Nicole Mellow - Political Science, University of Texas, Austin

Project: Rising Partisanship: A Study of the Regional Dimensions of Conflict in the Post-War House of Representatives

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Margaret Weir, University of California, Berkeley

Nicole Mellow is Associate Professor of Political Science at Williams College.

Her research interests are in American political development and she is currently at work on a book entitled Legacies of Loss in American Politics with Jeffrey Tulis (Princeton, forthcoming). She is also working on a project on national identity and state building at the beginning of the twentieth century, tentatively titled, How White Ethnics Got Themselves a New Deal: Nation Building and the Interventionist State, 1900 to 1940. 

Mellow's dissertation, "Rising Partisanship: A Study of the Regional Dimensions of Conflict in the Post-War House of Representatives," studied American political parties in the post-World War II era. She argued that the resurgence of congressional party conflict in recent decades after years of decreasing conflict, and the rise in partisanship since the 1970s, was in part the result of a regional restructuring of the party system, one in which the geographical bases of the two major parties shifted. Tensions within the New Deal party system contributed to the development of new regional orientations within the parties and this led to greater conflict between them. Mellow's research combined aggregate data analysis with historical case studies of conflict in the policy areas of trade, welfare, and abortion.

Selected Recent Publications

The State of Disunion: Regional Sources of Modern American Partisanship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

“The Anti-Federal Appropriation.” with Jeffrey Tulis, American Political Thought 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014).

“How the Democrats Rejuvenated Their Coalition.” in Michael Nelson, ed., The Elections of 2012 (Washington D.C.: CQ Press, 2013).

“Foreign Policy, Bipartisanship, and the Paradox of Post-September 11 America.” with Peter Trubowitz, International Politics 48, no.2-3 (2011): 164-187.

Mary Christina Michelmore - History, University of Michigan

Project: With the First Penny Paid: Welfare Reform, Tax Policy and Political Change, 1960–1980

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Julian Zelizer, Princeton University

Molly Michelmore is Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University.

Michelmore's research interests lie in 20th century American politics, and specifically in the relationship between fiscal policy, the politics of taxing and spending, and content of post-New Deal liberalism. She explored these concepts in her first book Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics and the Limits of American Liberalism.

Michelmore's dissertation placed the "Reagan Revolution" in historical context by studying the politics of welfare reform and tax policy between 1960 and 1980. Ronald Reagan's 1980 election represented the culmination of a decade-old re-evaluation of national political priorities, the result of which was a political settlement centrally concerned with the costs of the liberal state.

Her dissertation explores how and why "welfare" grew from a policy problem of interest to only a small group of experts into an issue of national political importance, and examines the era's larger political, economic and social changes. Examining social and fiscal policies considered or enacted between 1967 and 1980, Michelmore's dissertation analyzed the process by which taxes and welfare became two sides of the same coin and were politicized to an unprecedented extent in the 1970s. Specifically, she argued that both welfare and taxes became important weapons in the arsenal of the conservative attack on the state and its reification of the market, that the politics and policies of welfare reform played a significant role in the rise of conservatism and the repudiation of the postwar liberal paradigm.

Selected Recent Publications

"Why the income tax is worth celebrating." Washington Post Opinions, February 17, 2013.

Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics and the Limits of American Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

"'What Have You Done for Me Lately?': The Welfare State, Tax Politics and the Search for a New Majority, 1968-1980." Journal of Policy History 24, no. 4 (October 2012): 709-740.

"Don't Just Blame the Republicans for the No-Tax Pledge -- Democrats are Allergic to Tax Hikes, Too." History News Network, July 9, 2012.

Paul Milazzo - History, University of Virginia

Project: Legislating the Solution to Pollution: Congress and the Development of Federal Water Pollution Control Policy in the United States, 1945-1975

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Hugh Graham, Vanderbilt University

Paul Milazzo is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University.

Milazzo's areas of concentration include politics, political institutions, and federal policy, particularly after 1945. Professor Milazzo's recent research has focused on environmental policy making in the United States Congress. He received his A.B. from Amherst College (1991), and his M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (2001) from the University of Virginia. His book, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945-1972 was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2006. He has appeared on numerous television and radio broadcasts, including C-SPAN, Bloomberg Radio, and PBS.

Selected Recent Publications

Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945-1972 (University Press of Kansas, 2006)

"Environmental Policy: An Overview.” in Oxford Encyclopedia of American Political, Policy, and Legal History, ed. Donald T. Critchlow and Philip R. VanderMeer. (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Introduction to Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), pp. xxvi-liv

“Nixon and the Environment.” in A Companion to Richard M. Nixon, ed. Melvin Small (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): pp. 270-91.

Rachel Moran - History, Penn State University

Project: Body Politic: Federal Policy-Making on American Physique, 1890–1965

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Margot Canaday, Princeton University

Rachel Louise Moran is Lecturer in History at the University of North Texas

Rachel recently completed a dual Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University in 2013, after which she was a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the PSU history department. 

She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores how the United States government developed policies over time meant to quite literally ‘shape’ American citizens.  Moran explores federal nutrition and exercise policy, and consider the overlap of citizenship, policy, health, and weight. From the height-weight tables of the Children’s Bureau to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Moran argues that managing and molding American bodies has long been an interest of federal agencies.

In addition to the Miller Center Fellowship, Moran has also held a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship. She has previously held the Crawford Family Fellowship in Ethical Inquiry and Cornell University’s Fellowship in the History of Home Economics.

Selected Recent Publications

“Weighing in about Weight: Advisory Power in the Bureau of Home Economics.” in Remaking Home Economics: Resourcefulness and Innovation in Changing Times, ed. Sharon Y. Nikols and Gwen Kay (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2015)

Michael Morgan - History, New York University

Project: The Origins of the Helsinki Final Act, 1954–1975

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Tony Judt, New York University

Michael Morgan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Morgan’s research focuses on the international history of the twentieth century, especially the Cold War. His current project examines the origins of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a 35-country agreement that was a turning point in East-West relations and a landmark in the history of human rights.  He teaches courses on the history of international relations since the seventeenth century and the history of human rights.

Morgan's dissertation argued that the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975 was a turning point in the history of the Cold War. The brief ceremony in the Finnish capital was the culmination of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), one of the largest and most ambitious diplomatic undertakings in European history. Over the course of nearly three years, 35 countries jointly hammered out an agreement that covered almost every aspect of international affairs, including sovereignty and borders, economic and commercial relations, and human rights. By injecting human rights into geopolitics for the first time, by calling the centuries-old principle of absolute sovereignty into question, and by raising the possibility of reunifying a divided Europe, the Final Act had profound consequences for the future of the Cold War. It crystallized the difference between the political systems of Eastern and Western Europe, secured communist recognition of basic human rights standards, and, most importantly, bolstered dissident movements across Eastern Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, the Final Act's contribution to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has been widely acknowledged, and Morgan's dissertation, based on newly-declassified material from North American and European archives, was the first comprehensive account of how and why it came into being.

Selected Recent Publications

“The Ambiguities of Humanitarian Intervention.” in Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, eds., The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (Brookings Institution Press, 2015)

“The Seventies and the Rebirth of Human Rights.” in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The International History of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2010).
“The United States and the Making of the Helsinki Final Act.” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations 1969–1977  (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Jamie Morin - Political Science, Yale University

Project: Squaring the Pentagon: The Politics of Post-Cold War Defense Retrenchment

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Alton Frye, Council on Foreign Relations

Jamie Morin is the Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation for the Department of Defense.

As director, he leads an organization responsible for analyzing and evaluating the Department's plans, programs, and budgets in relation to U.S. defense objectives, projected threats, allied contributions, estimated costs, and resource constraints. To support better defense decision making, CAPE develops analytical tools and methods for analyzing national security planning and the allocation of resources. 

Prior to joining CAPE, Morin served for five years as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller. As the Air Force's chief financial officer, he was the principal advisor to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force on financial matters, responsible for the financial and analytical services necessary for the effective and efficient use of Air Force resources. 

From 2003 until his current appointment, Dr. Morin was a member of the professional staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget. In this capacity, he served as the committee's lead analyst for the defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs budgets, responsible for drafting the relevant sections of the congressional budget resolution and advising the Senate on enforcement of budget rules. Additionally, he advised the Chairman of the Budget Committee on the full range of national security issues.

In his dissertation, Morin explored how the politics of defense budgeting in the 1990s differed from that of the late Cold War, and how that affected America's national defense. He identified negative consequences stemming from the post-Cold War drawdown, but rejected the idea that they resulted from over-eager cutting of the defense budget. Rather, he argued that they resulted from a budgetary process that failed to optimally balance spending and effectiveness because it was too inflexible to deal appropriately with an uncertain future. Morin's hypotheses placed their roots in the political science literature on defense politics, but were also shaped by his extensive interviews with a long list of defense policymakers, congressional staff, and lobbyists.

Andrew Morris - History, University of Virginia

Project: Charity, Therapy, and Poverty: Private Social Service in the Era of Public Welfare

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara

Andrew Morris is Associate Professor of History at Union College.

Morris teaches 20th century American political history. 

Morris's dissertation examined how voluntary social welfare agencies came to terms with the expansion of the public welfare state from the 1930s through the 1960s. By examining a group of private family welfare agencies, Morris traced how these charities reinvented themselves from dispensers of material aid in the 1910s and 1920s to providers of therapeutic counseling services in the 1940s and 1950s. The Depression and World War II proved key turning points, demonstrating to private agencies the need for a relatively strong public welfare state to meet the basic needs of the poor, as well as the need for such agencies to clearly distinguish themselves both from their charitable past and from public welfare entities. By embracing a variety of counseling techniques rooted in the psychological training of their professional social workers, private family agencies helped build a therapeutic culture in the postwar United States, and decisively influenced the adoption of rehabilitative social work as an element of welfare reform in the early 1960s.

Selected Recent Publications

Check out Morris speaking about the politics of disaster during the Miller Center's Great Issues Series (2014)

Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Quinn Mulroy - Politics, Columbia University

Project: Private Litigation, Public Policy Enforcement: The Regulatory Power of Private Litigation and the American Bureaucracy

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Dan Carpenter, Harvard University

Quinn Mulroy is Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University

Mulroy received a Ph.D. in American Politics from Columbia University where she worked with Ira Katznelson. She received a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley in 2001.

She studies American politics, with a substantive focus on race and labor policy, the legal system, and regulatory agencies and a methodological interest in combining historical and quantitative approaches to research. Her current research project investigates the role of private power, particularly that supplied by private litigation, in the American regulatory state, and uses archival and statistical work to explore how and under what conditions regulatory agencies motivate private actors to engage in litigation that advances regulatory goals. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Political Development ("The Rise and Decline of Presidential Populism" (October 2004), co-authored with Terri Bimes, University of California-Berkeley), and she is a researcher with the American Institutions Project (under Ira Katznelson and John Lapinski) at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia. Her research interests include American political development, public policy, political institutions, the courts and litigation, bureaucracy, Congress, and race and labor policy.

Her dissertation examined the role of private power, particularly that supplied by private litigation, in the American regulatory state. While traditional accounts suggest that the progressive regulatory state that came into being over the course of the extended New Deal and Great Society periods is weak when compared to its counterparts abroad, Mulroy's research builds on a revisionist strain within the APD literature which identifies strategies by which a lean liberal state can achieve impressive regulatory results. Through a historical analysis of the development of the regulatory capacity of several agencies, she argued that constrained agencies may look outside themselves, and their formally granted administrative powers, for enforcement power by developing incentive structures that encourage private actors to engage in litigation that advances regulatory goals. She found that variation in the use of this alternate source of regulatory power by agencies can be explained by factors related to an agency's institutional development and formation, but also that the character, scope, and activation of this pathway of enforcement over time is contingent upon political and temporal considerations. By reconsidering how to integrate informal mechanisms of enforcement, like agency-motivated private litigation, into theories of bureaucratic regulation, her project aimed to contribute to our practical understanding of 'day-to-day' agency behavior and to our conceptions and assessments of state capacity, more broadly.

Selected Recent Publications

“Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Coalitions during the New Deal and Fair Deal.” with Ira Katznelson, Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (April 2012): 604-620.

Stephanie Muravchik - History, University of Virginia

Project: New Creatures in Christ: American Faith in an Age of Psychology

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Gary Laderman, Emory University

Stephanie Muravchik is Associate Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Muravchik’s research has focused on twentieth-century American religion and the way self and community have been historically constituted in the United States. 
Her first book, American Protestantism in an Age of Psychology challenges the claim that psychology has been used to weaken American religion, virtue and community. It shows how major psychospiritual movements since World War II, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and The Salvation Army, innovated a practical religious psychology that nurtured participants’ faith, fellowship, and responsibility. And by fostering community and responsibility among some of America’s most disaffected citizens, psychospiritual movements helped cultivate the kind of society that bolsters our liberal democracy.

In her dissertation, Muravchik explores how after World War II, though they did not realize it, Christians began a successful project of redeeming millions of alienated Americans by fortifying pastoral care, fellowships, and evangelism with secular ideas and techniques adapted from psychology. They thereby shepherded millions of the nation's most disaffected citizens – especially the homeless, addicts, the sick, and the dying – into faith's fold. Muravchik traced their efforts and its effects in three contexts: the psychiatric training of ministers, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and The Salvation Army rehabilitation centers. She ultimately argued that the model of selfhood developed in these settings, by merging individual happiness and self-determination with transcendent and communal relationships, could support an American democratic culture in the latter half of the 20th century.

Selected Recent Publications

American Protestantism in an Age of Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

“The Cultural Contours of Parenthood: A Bibliographic Review.” Hedgehog Review 15(3) 2013: 54-61.

“‘Be the Love of God Rather than Talk About It’: Pastors Study Psychology.” History of Psychology 15(2) 2012: 145-160. 

Victor Nemchenok - History, University of Virginia

Project: A Dialogue of Power: Development, Global Civil Society, and the Third World Challenge to the International Order, 1970–1988

Fellowship year: 2012

Mentor: Erez Manela, Harvard University

Victor Nemchenok is an Internal Affairs Analyst for the Defense Department.

Nemchenok’s dissertation opens up a new avenue for international development studies by looking at the other side of the story: how experts and NGOs from the global “south,” the third world, interpreted and contested leading nation’s efforts at modernization over the 1970s and 1980s. His dissertation is titled “A Dialogue of Power: Development, Global Civil Society, and the Third World Challenge to the International Order, 1970-1988.” Nemchenok has published in Cold War History, The Middle East Journal, and Diplomacy and Statecraft.

Shannon Nix - History, University of Virginia

Project: ‘The Soul of our Foreign Policy’: Human Rights Politics, U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Struggle for Central America, 1976-1984

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: William Michael Schmidli, Bucknell University

Shannon Nix’s dissertation examines a series of transnational political struggles waged on the terrain of human rights and their influence on U.S. policy toward overlapping Central American crises during the Carter and Reagan administrations.  While recognizing the importance of traditional U.S. policymakers, it draws attention to the contribution of non-governmental organizations in Washington and their transnational advocacy networks. Often staffed by former missionaries, as well as civil rights and antiwar activists, many had close ties to mainstream religious groups. Increasingly disillusioned with U.S. Cold War policy, they sought to change Washington’s policy toward nations tragically riven by intransigent inequality and civil war. Building on longstanding commitments to the Social Gospel, fused with emerging theological commitments to ecumenicism and social justice, they used human rights politics to shape both policy and the domestic political climate. More than a Cold War struggle for Central American hearts and minds, this was, quite literally, one for the “soul of American foreign policy.”

Margaret Pugh O’Mara - History, University of Pennsylvania

Project: Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Politics and the Roots of the Information Age Metropolis, 1945–75

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Bruce Schulman, Boston University

Margaret O'Mara is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington.

O'Mara's research interests include: Silicon Valley, national politics, economic globalization, postindustrial cities, and higher education. Her current research project examines the technology industry's impact on politics, culture, and place since 1970. She also works with government, business, and civic organizations on projects exploring how innovation drives growth and change.  Most recently, she was the lead curatorial advisor to the Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle's Museum of History and Industry.

O'Mara's dissertation, "Cold War Politics and the Roots of the Information Age Metropolis, 1945–1975," examined the effect of Cold War politics upon urban space in the United States during the 30 years following World War II. She specifically explored the way in which the increased national focus on higher education and scientific research during the 1950s and 1960s strongly encouraged the suburbanization of people and industry – particularly the rapidly growing advanced scientific sectors – in metropolitan areas in many different parts of the country, including the major metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Northern California's Silicon Valley.

Selected Recent Publications

Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections That Shaped the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

"The Environmental Contradictions of High-Tech Urbanism." in Jeff Hou, Ben Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocum, eds., Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge, 2014).

"The Uses of the Foreign Student." Social Science History 36, no.4 (December 2012).

“Cities and Suburbs." in Lynn Dumenil, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Douglas O’Reagan - History, University of California, Berkeley

Project: Science, Technology and Diplomacy: American, British, and French Efforts to Extract German Science and Technology During and Following the Second World War

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: James Hershberg, George Washington University

Douglas O'Reagan has been selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

Douglas O'Reagan is a postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities in the Departmentof History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2016 where he works closely with faculty members of Humanities subjects (History, Literature, Global Studies and Languages, and Comparative Media Studies/Writing) to produce a comprehensive assessment of the needs, current capacity, and future uses of digital humanities at MIT.  Prior to joining MIT, O'Reagan was visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Washington State University

O'Reagan's dissertation, "Science, Technology and Diplomacy: American, British, and French Efforts to Extract German Science and Technology During and Following the Second World War," provided a comparative perspective and analysis of the possibilities and difficulties of international technology transfer.  Following the Second World War, the United States, United Kingdom, and France operated cooperative yet competitive efforts to extract technology, industrial machinery, and scientific personnel from Germany. The United States and United Kingdom began these efforts in a joint study of German military technology for use against Japan, yet they quickly expanded to cover all aspects of civilian industrial technology, and the newly-established Gaullist French government eagerly joined in, each nation anticipating great value from these "intellectual reparations." Some aspects of these programs have become something like common knowledge - the most famous case being the German aeronautical engineers led by Wernher von Braun drafted into American space research through "Operation Paperclip" – but they have rarely been considered in a wider context, as a phenomenon international in character but with key differences in the programs' implementation and goals in each national context. O'Reagan's dissertation also examines the role of access to shared technology in postwar international economic integration; how each nation's postwar challenges, and a growing perception of the importance of science and technology in overcoming them, impacted early Cold War diplomacy; and how these local circumstances shaped each country's experience of the broader phenomenon of the drawing together of industry, academic institutions, and governments experienced by each nation during and quickly following the war.

Selected Recent Publications

"Learning to Code, Learning to Collaborate."  Berkeley Digital Humanities blog, July 9, 2015.

"French Scientific Exploitation and Technology Transfer from Germany in the Diplomatic Context of the Early Cold War." International History Review (February 13, 2014)

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Tore Olsson - History, University of Georgia

Project: Agrarian Crossings: The American South, Mexico, and the Twentieth-Century Remaking of the Rural World

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: Sarah T. Phillips, Boston University

Tore Olsson has been selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

Tore Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee.  Olsson's teaching and research examine the twentieth-century United States in global perspective, with an emphasis on agriculture, food, environment, rural history, and Latin America, particularly Mexico.

He is currently working on his first book, titled Remaking the Rural World: The American South and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (under contract, Princeton University Press), which weaves together the agrarian history of two places seldom discussed in common context: the American Cotton Belt and Mexico. On one hand, it illustrates how U.S. southerners and Mexicans in the first half of the twentieth century confronted similar problems in their countrysides, particularly uneven land tenure, racialized labor regimes, and plantation monoculture. More importantly, however, it reveals how cosmopolitan rural reformers in each place acknowledged their common struggle and fostered a lively transnational dialogue on questions of land, agriculture, and rural life. The book makes two primary arguments: first, it demonstrates how the American South served as the domestic laboratory for the Green Revolution, the most important Third World “development” campaign of the twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that the rural New Deal in the United States was radicalized by observations of Mexican revolutionary rhetoric and action. Rather than a comparative history, Remaking the Rural World is a history of comparisons and the way that comparison impacted policy, moved people, and remade landscapes.

Olsson’s book is based on his 2013 dissertation, which was recently the winner of the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History, granted by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Gilbert C. Fite Dissertation Award for best dissertation in agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society. His research for the dissertation and manuscript has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Miller Center, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and several others.

At the University of Tennessee, Professor Olsson teaches courses on food and agriculture, U.S. foreign relations, and U.S. and Latin American social and political history.

Selected Recent Publications

Remaking the Rural World: The American South and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (in progress, under contract in Princeton University Press’s “America in the World” series).

“Sharecroppers and Campesinos: The American South, Mexico, and the Transnational Politics of Land Reform in the Radical 1930s.” Journal of Southern History (August 2015).

Suleiman Osman - History of American Civilization, George Washington University

Project: The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Post industrialization and Race in South Brooklyn from 1950 to 1980

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

Suleiman Osman is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University.

He specializes in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the way urban space both shapes and is produced by culture and politics. His book Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York was published by Oxford University Press in February 2011. A history of gentrification in Brooklyn, the book explores the relationship between New York’s physical and symbolic cityscapes. Tracing the efforts of a new middle class to reinhabit and restore aging Victorian neighborhoods, Professor Osman examines how Brooklyn’s declining commercial and industrial landscapes were recast as postindustrial sites of anti-bureaucratic authenticity.

Professor Osman is also pursuing a broader project that looks at 1970s’ urban politics and culture. His recent chapter, "The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman’s Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, offers an analysis of the “neighborhood movement” of the 1970s and traces the widespread and eclectic revolts against urban growth politics in New York, Boston and other cities in the 1970s.

Selected Recent Publications

The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Katie Otis - History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Project: Everything Old is New Again: What Policymakers and Baby Boomers Can Learn from the History of Aging and Retirement

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Andy Achenbaum, University of Houston

Katie Otis is a visiting Lecturer in the History Department at the University of North Carolina.

Otis's dissertation explored the history of aging in mid-to-late 20th-century America through the lens of retirement life in Florida, a state long synonymous with shuffleboard and park benches. She explained that Social security and private pensions sparked the growth of mass retirement among the working and middle classes. On the whole, seniors are healthier and wealthier than ever before. Their growing numbers, moreover, captured the attention of politicians, policymakers, and advocacy groups who worked to improve the quality of later life. The need for dignified, cost-effective elder care remained woefully unfulfilled. Drawing on government documents, gerontological studies, popular retirement literature, and oral histories, Otis's work melded institutional and political history with the cultural and social experiences of aging in the postwar world to give voice to older Americans as they negotiated the promises and pitfalls of old age and retirement.

Julia Ott - History, Yale University

Project: When Wall Street Met Main Street: the Quest for an Investors' Democracy and the Emergence of the American Retail Investor, 1900–1930

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Meg Jacobs, Princeton University

Julia Ott is Assistant Professor of History at the New School's Eugene Lang College.

Ott's interests include 20th century American history, financial and business history, political conservatism, consumer culture, and women's and gender history.

Given the depths of populist and progressive hostility toward Wall Street in the decades before the World War I, few could have predicted that the nation's stock and bond markets would emerge as icons of a new era of permanent prosperity, even before the late 1920s stock market boom. Roughly 30 million Americans acquired federal war bonds, while the number of corporate shareholders likely increased fivefold in the 1920s. Ott's dissertation explained these transformations in political attitude and social practice by relating an intertwined history of investors and investorism. By analyzing the marketing of stocks and bonds by the federal government, corporations, and the financial industry, as well as new investorist theories of political economy formulated by a range of economic thinkers, her study revealed the early twentieth century origins of the idea of an ownership society in American political culture. Without the ideological validation considered in this dissertation, the United States would have never developed its first broad, national, impersonal market for financial securities in the 1920s.

Selected Recent Publications

How Tax Policy Created the 1% (Dissent)

When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy, (Harvard University Press, 2011).

R. Joseph Parrott - History, University of Texas - Austin

Project: “Struggle for Solidarity: New Left Politics and African Decolonization"”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Robert McMahon, Ohio State University

R. Joseph Parrott is an assistant professor of diplomatic/transnational history at Ohio State University. Before that, he was a Chauncey Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Studies program at Yale University. He studies the intersections of decolonization and the Cold War, the effects of transnational activism on Western domestic politics, and Pan-Africanism. He earned his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2016 with a dissertation entitled “Struggle for Solidarity: New Left Politics and African Decolonization.”

Dr. Parrott is currently revising a manuscript that examines the formation of a broad solidarity network in the United States and Europe in support of African nationalism. Drawing on theories of globalization and transnationalism, he argues that the technological and political decentralization of the international system linked peoples across geographical and linguistic borders in ways that directly influenced Euro-American perceptions of the global South. Western activists rallied to the cause of socialist liberation in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau despite official support for North Atlantic ally Portugal. Westerners merged the domestic pursuit of racial equality with goals of African self-determination to craft grassroots movements that articulated an ideology of global social justice and economic reform. The popularity of this New Left internationalism directly influenced policymakers sensitive to public opinion in the wake of the Vietnam War, most clearly evidenced by successful domestic opposition to Gerald Ford’s anti-communist intervention in postcolonial Angola. Cutting across intellectual, diplomatic, and socio-cultural histories of the Cold War, the project argues that the growth of an influential solidarity network helped transform American debates over foreign policy and intervention in the global South.

Before completing his degree, Dr. Parrott held pre-doctoral fellowships with the Miller Center, Yale ISS, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago. He has received grants from three presidential libraries, the Council for European Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the New York Public Library among others. He is currently working to assemble an academic study of Revolutionary Tricontinentalism, and his writings have appeared in the peer-reviewed Race & Class, WGBH’s OpenVault, and on various academic and popular history websites including OZY, the History News Network, and Exeter’s Imperial and Global Forum. Dr. Parrott holds an MPP degree from the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter at @RJParrott_

Selected Recent Publications

"When Black Power Went Global." Ozy. 27 May 2016.

"Charleston Shooting Exposes America's Pro-Apartheid Cold War Past." Imperial and Global Forum. 6 July 20165.

“A Luta Continua: Radical Filmmaking, Pan-African Liberation, and Communal Empowerment.” Race & Class 57, no. 1 (July-September, 2015): 20-38.

Emily Pears - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: “Chords of Sympathy: The Development of National Political Attachments in the 19th Century”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Emily Zackin, The Johns Hopkins University

Emily Pears is an Assistant Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Her research is in the areas of 19th-century U.S. federalism, American political development, American nationalism and U.S. state building. Emily received her B.A. in Government from Claremont McKenna College and M.A in American Politics from the University of Virginia. She previously worked as a policy advocate for voting rights and redistricting reform issues in San Francisco and Sacramento, California.

Emily’s dissertation begins with the question of when and how citizens’ political attachments originally shifted from the state governments to the national government during the 19th century.  Looking specifically at how state building, party organization and cultural homogenization impacted citizens’ differential attachments to their state and national governments, Emily argues that across the United States state legislatures continued to hold public sway well past the civil war period.  While the national state grew significantly during the course of the 19th century, administrative functions at the state and local level remained the most visible to American citizens, allowing and encouraging them to maintain strong attachments to their state governments.  Party building in the 1830’s and 1840’s created an organizational structure that allowed individuals to connect their local activities to national political causes.

Justin Peck - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: Reclaiming Power: An Analysis of Congressional Reassertion Efforts, 1828–2002

Fellowship year: 2013

Mentor: William Howell, University of Chicago

Justin Peck is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University

His research is in the areas of separation of powers (Congress and the presidency), American Political Development, and American political institutions, and race policy.  His work has appeared in Studies in American Political Development (“Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891-1940” (April 2010), co-authored with Jeffery A. Jenkins and Vesla M. Weaver University of Virginia), and is forthcoming at the Law and History Review (“Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1940-1950,” coauthored with Jeffery A. Jenkins, University of Virginia.) His writing has also been published by the online edition of Dissent magazine.

Justin received a B.A. in Politics and History from Brandeis University in 2005. After graduating he went on to work on the legislative staff and presidential campaign of then-Senator Christopher J. Dodd. After spending two years in Washington, D.C. he made the transition to University of Virginia.

Justin's dissertation examines Congressional efforts to reassert authority vis-à-vis the executive branch.  He defines congressional reassertion as any attempt by Congress–using the formal law-making process–to challenge or contest executive branch governing authority. Through a detailed search of the History of Joint Bills and Resolutions, he compiles an index of legislative reassertion bills.  He then categorizes reassertion strategies over time, systematically analyzes the motivations underlying those who instigate such efforts, and specifies the political conditions that generate them.  In so doing, he uses both historical and large-n methodology to provide insight into one neglected aspect of Congressional behavior, to illustrate patterns in reassertion activity over time, and to demonstrate the policy consequences that inhere to conflicts over “who governs” in our system of separate institutions sharing powers.

Selected Recent Publications

"Congressional Reassertion of Authority.” in Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science. ed. Rick Valelly. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

“Building Toward Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941-1950.” with Jeffery A. Jenkins.  Law and History Review 31 (February 2013): 139-198

Sarah T. Phillips - History, Boston University

Project: Acres Fit and Unfit: Environmental Liberalism and the American State, 1925–1955

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Edmund Russell, University of Kansas

Sarah Phillips is Associate Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Boston University.

She received her Ph.D. from the History Department at Boston University in 2004 and spent five years as an assistant professor at Columbia University before returning to BU. She is the author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and, with co-author Shane Hamilton, The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics, published by Bedford/St. Martins in 2014.  She has written essays and articles on environmental history, antebellum reform, transatlantic agricultural developments, the interwar economy, and the conservation and environmental policy of state governors. Her current book project, The Price of Plenty: From Farm to Food Politics in Postwar America, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the domestic politics sustaining the massive farm surpluses of the post-World War II era that established the United States as the predominant and most problematic of the state actors in the international food regime.

Selected Recent Publications

This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents, with
 Shane 
Hamilton (Bedford/St.
Martins,
 
2013)

“Reflections on One Hundred and Fifty Years of the United States Department of Agriculture.” Agricultural History, 87, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 314-367.

Kimberly Phillips-Fein - History, Columbia University

Project: Top-Down Revolution: The Birth of Free Market Politics in America and the Backlash Against the New Deal

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Bruce Schulman, Boston University

Kimberly Phillips-Fein is Associate Professor of Economic Thought and History at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

As a historian of twentieth-century American politics, she teaches courses in American political, business, and labor history. Her first book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. She has contributed to essay collections published by Harvard University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, and Routledge and to journals such as Reviews in American History and International Labor and Working-Class History. She is a contributing editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History in the Americas, where her work has also appeared. Professor Phillips-Fein has written widely for publications including The Nation, London Review of Books, New Labor Forum, to which she has contributed articles and reviews. She was given a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars, Artists and Writers at the New York Public Library for 2014-2015 for work on her forthcoming book, Fear City: The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of the Age of Austerity.

Selected Recent Publications

How the Fiscal Crisis of the ’70s Shaped Today’s New York

Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

 “Why Workers Won’t Unite” The Atlantic, March 16, 2015.

Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009).

Stephen Porter - History, University of Chicago

Project: Defining Public Responsibility in a Global Age: Refugee Resettlement in the U.S., 1933 to 1980

Fellowship year: 2006

Mentor: Akira Iriye, Harvard University

Stephen Porter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.

Steve Porter explores the intersection of humanitarianism and extensions of U.S. power over the long twentieth century. He has considered these issues in his book, Benevolent Empire? U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed(University of Pennsylvania Press, Oct. 2016), as well as through shorter publications and professional presentations. Central to his research interests are changing conceptions of ethical responsibilities and rights as well as the ways in which a panoply of state and non-state actors have collaborated – productively and otherwise – in innovative strategies to managing refugee crises and other humanitarian dilemmas wrought by war, persecution, upheaval, and other disruptive phenomena so emblematic of the modern world order. These efforts include both international aid initiatives on behalf of vulnerable populations abroad and domestic programs to systematically resettle select groups of political refugees admitted to the U.S.
 
His current research agenda includes pursuing these themes through the past several decades. He is additionally examining how Cold-War era U.S.-Americans, operating outside of government, engaged with counterparts in communist countries in efforts at nongovernmental diplomacy when their respective states largely maintained adversarial postures toward one another.
 
At the University of Cincinnati, he has served as director of the International Human Rights Certificate, chair of the Tolley Scholarship in International Human Rights, and chair of the Taft Center’s Human Rights Research Group. He is a former fellow of the Institute for Historical Studies. He has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago.

Selected Recent Publications

Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World's Dispossessed. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

“Humanitarian Diplomacy after World War II: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.” in Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy. (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Robert Rakove - History, University of Virginia

Project: Befriending the Nonaligned: Kennedy, Johnson and the Neutral Powers

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Robert McMahon, Ohio State University

Robert Rakove is a Lecturer in History at Stanford University.

Rakove studies the history of U.S. foreign relations.  His book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World examines a critical period in the history of the relationship between the United States and the postcolonial world.  He is broadly interested in the interaction between the Cold War and decolonization.  

Rakove's dissertation examined the goals and strategies behind the policy of nonalignment, as well as its impact on world events in the 1960s. More broadly, this project pondered the dilemmas posed by efforts to reach beyond existing geopolitical relationships. Inevitably, it must consider basic structural questions: were the nonaligned states, each fielding major regional aspirations, viable partners for Washington? Were there inherent structural obstacles that could not be overcome? The dilemmas of great power status were central to this project, and the lessons we might learn from studying the challenges faced by Kennedy and Johnson bear some relevance in today's multipolar world.

Selected Recent Publications

Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

“Two Roads to Belgrade: The United States, Great Britain and the First Nonaligned Conference.” Cold War History 14, No. 3 (2014) 337-357

Jose Luis Ramos - History, University of Chicago

Project: The Other Revolution: Politics, Culture, and the Transformation of U.S.-Mexican Relations after the Mexican Revolution, 1919–1930

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Frank Ninkovich

Jose Luis Ramos is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Valparaiso University.

Ramos’s dissertation is a revisionist interpretation of 20th century United States-Mexican history. He examines the origins of a rich and unacknowledged history of collaboration that began during the 1920s, the decade after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Due to assumptions that political and cultural conflict has determined US-Mexican history, there is no historical explanation for the remarkable improvement of US-Mexican relations after the Mexican Revolution, the persistence of Mexican sovereignty, and the increasing influence of American culture. To answer these questions, his project traces how Americans and Mexicans collaborated in the reconstruction of post-Revolutionary Mexico and US-Mexican relations in six areas traditionally examined as evidence of conflicting interests: the oil controversy, inter-American politics, the external debt, rural reconstruction, immigration, and public health. Luis argues that in the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, a political and cultural transformation in how Americans and Mexicans understood each other encouraged mutually beneficial political arrangements that leveraged power asymmetry, sustained Mexican sovereignty, and spurred common networks of progressive reformers that connected the political and intellectual agendas of American progressivism and Mexican revolutionary nationalism. This marked an exceptional embrace of revolutionary nationalism and the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship unlike any other in Latin America, what he calls the other revolution. His work contributes to studies of US-Mexican history and to broader debates on the relationship between international politics, culture, and nationalism.

Aaron Rapport - Political Science, University of Minnesota

Project: Planning in the Shadow of the Future: U.S. Military Interventions and Time Horizons

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Jack Levy, Rutgers University

Aaron Rapport is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University.

He is also a Fellow at Corpus Christi College and was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Rapport's research interests include international security, political psychology, and U.S. foreign policy. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses on these topics, as well as qualitative research methodology.  His book, Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars came out in 2015 and was part of Cornell University Press’s Security Affairs series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals International Security, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, and Security Studies.

Rapport's dissertation examined cases of major U.S. involvement in military campaigns from 1945 to 2003 in order to illuminate factors that caused state leaders to underestimate the long-term costs of foreign military intervention. Scholars of international relations have noted that the tendency to underestimate long-term costs of military action has pervaded thinking in the United States as well as that of other state leaders considering intervention. He argued that the cognitive process by which people evaluate future events can help account for poor strategic assessment.

Selected Recent Publications

Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

"Whatever He Decides, Afghanistan Will Hurt Obama." The Providence Journal, October 2009.

David Reinecke - Sociology, Princeton University

Project: "Network Struggles: Re-wiring American Network Industries for Competition, 1970-2005"

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Richard John, Columbia University

David Reinecke has been selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

David Reinecke is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at Princeton University.  With a background in the history of science and technology from the University of Pennsylvania, his work takes a comparative-historical approach to the study of market formation.  His dissertation compares the deregulation of four network industries in the United States (electricity, natural gas, railroads, and telecom) from 1970 to the present with a focus upon struggles in each industry to define the appropriate form of networked competition.  How the physical networks of each industry were politically reconfigured differently, the dissertation argues, sent these industries down divergent market trajectories. 

His past work has examined entrepreneurial middle class formation during the industrial revolution, the emergence of genre science fiction in the pages of lowbrow pulp fiction magazines, and the legal problem of classifying the nationality of ships captured at sea by privateers—all published or forthcoming in different academic journals.  With Janet Vertesi at Princeton, he is currently engaged in studying how NASA spaceflight missions get funded (short answer: they don’t) and is helping to advise future missions on questions of socio-technical organization.  For more information, visit www.david-reinecke.com or tweet @davimre. 

Jonathan Renshon - Government, Harvard University

Project: Fighting for Status: Prestige Motivations and Conflict in World Politics

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: William Wohlforth, Dartmouth College

Jonathan Renshon is Trice Faculty Scholar and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Renshon received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2012. The focus of his research lies at the intersection of the psychology of judgment and decision-making and international security. His work has appeared in Political Psychology, Foreign Policy and Journal of Conflict Resolution. He is also a researcher in the Emotion and Decision-Making Group at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory.

The purpose of his dissertation is to investigate how the concern for status and prestige affects states’ decisions in the domain of international security. There is widespread agreement, both within the political science discipline and the foreign policy community, that status matters, though very little in the way of focused research on how and when it does so. This has left us with two significant gaps in our understanding of how status affects national security and foreign policy behavior. Firstly, and most importantly, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided thus far by intuition, not by evidence. Furthermore, relying on the assumption that "status matters" has left us with no extant theory of variation in states’ concern for status or understanding of its specific implications for foreign policy or international conflict. What is needed—and what his research is designed to provide—is an investigation into the systematic ways in which the desire to increase or prevent the loss of status affects the behavior of states, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for violent conflict.

Selected Recent Publications

"Status Deficits and War." International Organization (Forthcoming: June 22, 2016) 

"Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Commitment Problems." with Jooa Julia Lee and Dustin Tingley, International Organization (June 2, 2016)

"The Interaction of Testosterone and Cortisol Is Associated With Attained Status in Male Executives." with Gary D. Sherman et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2015)

"Physiological Arousal and Political Beliefs." with Julia J. Lee and Dustin Tingley, Political Psychology 36, no. 5 (2015): 569-585.

Jesse Rhodes - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: Making the Educational State: The Transformation of Educational Governance in the U.S. from a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Cathie Martin, Boston University

Jesse Rhodes is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rhodes's major areas of scholarly interest are social policy (especially education policy), political parties, and the American presidency. His book, An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of No Child Left Behind, has been published by Cornell University Press. With support from the Spencer Foundation, he is also analyzing the effects of education standards, testing, and accountability policies on citizenship; and with a Faculty Research Grant, I am investigating patterns of presidential partisan rhetoric. His research on political parties includes a longterm project, with Sidney Milkis, on the developing relationship between the presidency and the political parties during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and a multi-article study, with Shamira Gelbman, of the factors that inhibit or permit parties to embrace new positions on racial issues. 

Rhodes' dissertation blended historical and quantitative methods to model the development of new governing arrangements in education at the state and federal levels from the late 1970s to the present. As it showed, a national reform coalition composed of business elites, governors, and conservative intellectuals set a new agenda for education policy stressing high standards and accountability for results, profoundly shaping the trajectory of state educational policymaking during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the structure of opportunities and constraints provided by a diverse federal polity mediated the diffusion of the new educational agenda, helped create feedback loops that led to the reformulation of educational agendas and the refocusing of reformers on national government involvement, influenced the formation of new educational coalitions and organizations, and provided platforms and prestige for strategically placed individuals and groups to shape both state and national education debates. This policy feedback fed the increasing nationalization of educational governance, culminating in No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that has characterized the past two decades. However, states' commitment to the reform agenda have continued to be mediated by their unique political and racial environments, producing a patchwork of reform that belies NCLB's nationalizing pretensions.

Selected Recent Publications

"Financial Capacity, Ideology, and Political Donors in an Era of Deregulation." with Brian F Schaffner, Raymond J La Raja. (2016)

"Learning citizenship? How state education reforms affect parents’ political attitudes and behavior." Political Behavior 37, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 181-220.

"The transformation of partisan rhetoric in American presidential campaigns, 1952–2012." with Zachary Albert. Party Politics (October 19, 2015)

An Education in Politics: The Origin and Development of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012).

Kelly Kelleher Richter - History, Stanford University

Project: Uneasy Border State: The Politics and Public Policy of Latino Illegal Immigration in Metropolitan California

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Meg Jacobs, Princeton University

Kelly Kelleher Richter is a J.D. Candidate at Georgetown University Law Center, where she is a Public Interest Fellow.

Richter earned her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in January 2015, with a specialization in modern U.S. political and policy history, immigration, social policy, and race & ethnicity. She has since worked as a Policy Fellow at the National Immigration Law Center in Washington D.C., engaging in policy research and advocacy focusing on executive actions for immigrant access to status and immigration law enforcement. She has also lectured at Stanford in Washington, teaching a course on U.S. Immigration Politics and Policy.

Richter’s academic research centers on explaining the origins of modern American illegal immigration politics and policy. Her dissertation was the first academic work to comprehensively examine this topic through a focus on late-twentieth-century California, the state with the largest Latino undocumented immigrant population. Drawing on dozens of largely untapped archival collections of local, state, and federal officials, agencies, and legislative bodies, and advocates, as well as published government, legal, and media sources, her dissertation analyzed evolving debates over labor market impacts, social and fiscal policy, federal immigration policy implementation, local and state immigration policy, and immigration law enforcement. Richter’s project broke new ground for interdisciplinary understanding of modern American debates over immigration federalism and comprehensive immigration policy reform.

Selected Recent Publications

"Results from a Nationwide Survey of DACA Recipients Illustrate the Program's Impact" with Tom Wong, Ignacia Rodriguez, and Philip Wolgin. Center for American Progress, July 9, 2015.

Sarah E. Robey - History, Temple University

Project: The Atomic American: Citizenship in a Nuclear State, 1945-1963

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: Brian Balogh, University of Virginia

Sarah Robey is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University/Commerce. She was selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellow in Technology and Democracy. Nuclear weapons altered the relationship between the American state and its citizens in the early Cold War. From the Trinity Test forward, Americans grappled with the consequences of the nuclear weapons revolution. Among other challenges facing the nation, it was clear that military defense against a nuclear strike was nearly impossible and civilian preparation programs could cost billions of dollars. Should deterrence peacekeeping fail, Americans would face an attack without military protection, making large-scale civilian casualties unavoidable. “And yet,” Senator Brien McMahon puzzled in 1950, “the first duty of a sovereignty is to protect its people.” Nuclear weapons unsettled Americans’ ideas about federal protection, individual responsibility, and public safety. Under the threat posed by nuclear weapons technology, these conflicting concerns shaped domestic and international policy and framed national identity in the Atomic Age.

“The Atomic American: Citizenship in a Nuclear State, 1945-1963” explores the ways American policymakers, civilians, and scientists understood nuclear survival to be a product of the democratic relationship between the citizen and the state. Many new voices of authority emerged at the intersection of nuclear science and American civic culture: scientists became policy experts, science fiction marshaled moral critique, politicians assumed unpopular platforms for disarmament, and housewives became environmental advocates. By examining how nuclear survival was both a grassroots phenomenon and a top-down federal project, this dissertation demonstrates that the state, its citizenry, and science were interconnected agents of change in American Cold War society.

Joy Rohde - History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

Project: "The Social Scientists' War": Expertise in a Cold War Nation

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Ellen Herman, University of Oregon

Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan

Rohde specializes in U.S. national security policy and the history of science. She is interested broadly in the role that scientific experts—especially social scientists—play in American national security and foreign policy. Her book, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War, investigates the Cold War origins and contemporary consequences of the Pentagon’s social research contracting system. Her current research projects include a study of the role social scientists play in the Global War on Terror and a longitudinal study of the myriad ways the American state has deployed cultural knowledge over the last century to understand, manage, and control its perceived enemies.

In the late 1950s, Army officials and civilian social scientists joined forces to combat the spread of communism to the so-called "emerging nations" of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fusion of social science and statecraft reached its acme at the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), an interdisciplinary research institute created in 1956 by the Army and American University. For 15 years SORO's political scientists, social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists worked with Pentagon officials to illuminate the complex social processes involved in the creation of stable, democratic nations. But as the Vietnam War intensified in the late 1960s, a vocal community of academicians lambasted their Army-funded peers as servants of a war-mongering state, forcing SORO's closure in 1969. Rather than severing their close ties to the American state, however, SORO's experts relocated to a network of Washington think tanks and consulting agencies. From there, social scientists continued to influence American national security policy while the authority of their academic counterparts waned. Rohde's dissertation used the case of SORO to examine the multifaceted ways that social knowledge and state power extended, shaped, and reinforced one another during the Cold War.

Selected Recent Publications

"Police militarization is a legacy of cold war paranoia." The Conversation, October 22, 2014.

Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 

“From Expert Democracy to Beltway Banditry: How the Anti-War Movement Expanded the Military-Academic-Industrial Complex.” in Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012): 137-53.

“The Last Stand of the Psychocultural Cold Warriors: Military Contract Research in Vietnam.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47 (2011): 232-50.

Anthony Ross - History, University of Michigan

Project: The Ownership Society: Mortgage Securitization and the Metropolitan Landscape Since the 1960s

Fellowship year: 2014

Mentor: Kimberly Phillips-Fein, New York University

Anthony Ross is a Research Associate at the University of Michigan.

“The Ownership Society” examines the systematic transformation of the U.S. home finance industry between the 1960s and the 1990s.  During the early postwar era, a federal-local system of home finance compromised between the capital mobility required for suburban growth and the barriers that sustained localized financial relationships.  In the late 1960s, this system began to change.  To attract new sources of capital to a tightening mortgage market, policymakers partnered with financial elites to create a state-supported institutional network that would transform illiquid mortgages held by local financial institutions into liquid securities marketable on national and international capital markets.  By abstracting the value of place-bound mortgages and consolidating circuits of capital, mortgage securitization transformed the political economy of home finance.  Other policy changes during the 1970s and 1980s, such as the liberalization of branching regulations, contributed to the growth of securitization and the de-segmentation of the industry.  By the end of the 1980s, the  securitized home finance system had replaced the federal-local system of the early postwar era. “The Ownership Society” explores the causes and effects of this transformation through policy history and local case studies.  Its approach combines an economic history of home finance with a cultural history of homeownership.

Robert Saldin - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: War and American Political Development: Parties, State Building, and Democratic Rights Policy

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: David Mayhew, Yale University

Robert Saldin is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana, the Director of the Project on American Democracy and Citizenship, and a Fellow in Ethics and Public Affairs at the Mansfield Center.

Saldin's dissertation examined how wars affect American politics from the outside in and argued that they provide an explanatory framework that ties American state development, policy making, elections, and political parties together. In contrast to much of the existing American Political Development and Realignment literature, which focus solely on domestic factors, Saldin's project argued that wars affect American politics in several ways. He discussed how a greater appreciation of war's domestic impact offers guidance in understanding current domestic and international events.

Selected Recent Publications

War, the American State, and Politics Since 1898 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

"What War's Good For: Minority Rights Expansions in American Political Development." in New Directions in American Politics, ed. Raymond La Raja (Routledge, 2013).

"William McKinley and the Rhetorical Presidency." Presidential Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2011).

Susan Schantz - History, Brandeis University

Project: Work, Citizenship, and Welfare: The Institutionalization of the Work Ethic in Work Relief Policies from the New Deal to the Present

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University

In her dissertation, Schantz investigated the success and failure of work relief programs and, more specifically, the relationship between the work ethic and the American ideal of democratic citizenship. She examined case studies of work relief programs from three periods of economic change: the New Deal, the Great Society, and the contemporary scene. Schantz was awarded numerous teaching assistantships at Brandeis University and is the co-author of Best Practices Manual: Massachusetts and National Community Service Commission (1996).

Christopher Schmidt - History of American Civilization, Harvard University

Project: Postwar Liberalism and the Origins of Brown v. Board of Education

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Michael Klarman, Harvard University Law School

Christopher W. Schmidt is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent.

Schmidt teaches in the areas of constitutional law, legal history, comparative constitutional law, and sports law. He has written on a variety of topics, including the political and intellectual context surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Tea Party as a constitutional movement, how Supreme Court Justices communicate with the American people, the Supreme Court's decision in the health care case, and the rise of free agency in Major League Baseball. He is currently writing a book on the legal history of the student lunch counter sit-in movement of 1960.

Schmidt's dissertation followed the genesis of the 20th century American Civil Rights movement. Prior to the 1940s, the United States government had done little to promote racial equality for well over half a century, yet by the mid-1950s this situation was transformed, creating the foundations on which the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s would be built. Schmidt's dissertation explained the dramatic policy shift by analyzing the origins of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 school desegregation opinion. His project's central motivating question: why did the nine justices of the Supreme Court, whose political and ideological affinities varied considerably, decide to make, at this time and place, a statement against blatant legalized racial discrimination? His answer to this question drew on the context of liberal thought and culture in early postwar America as well as the particular legal issues confronted by the justices. Currently, Schmidt is revising his dissertation, "Creating Brown v. Board of Education: Ideology and Constitutional Change, 1945-1955," for publication.

Selected Recent Publications

"Divided by Law: The Sit-Ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement." Law and History Review (November 2013).

Lorraine Gates Schuyler - History, University of Virginia

Project: The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Politics in the 1920s

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: John Hansen, University of Chicago

Lorraine Gates Schuyler is the Chief of Staff in the Office of the President at the University of Richmond.

At Richmond, Schuyler is responsible for projects that span the divisions of the University, and she advises the president on policy decisions. Working with the President and the Vice Presidents, she manages a wide variety of planning efforts, helps lead the institutional budget process, and coordinates the work on the University's strategic plan. Before moving to the University of Richmond, Schuyler served as Assistant Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia, where she also taught in the history department.

Schuyler earned her doctorate in history from the University of Virginia, with a primary focus on twentieth-century southern history. Her first book, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s, was published in 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. That project focused on the effects of the Nineteenth Amendment in the South. In particular, The Weight of Their Votes explored the voter mobilization activities of black and white women in the South and the ways in which southern legislators responded to the policy demands of newly enfranchised women. In 2007 The Weight of Their Votes was named an Honor Book for non-fiction by the Library of Virginia Literary Awards and was awarded the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for the best book in Southern women's history. Schuyler has presented her work in numerous public and scholarly forums, including the Virginia Festival of the Book and the Clinton School of Public Service Distinguished Lecture Series.

Selected Recent Publications

The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (UNC Press, 2006).

Jennifer See - History, University of California

Project: American Cold War Policy in its Wider International and Domestic Context, 1945–47

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia

Jennifer See is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

See's dissertation examined American diplomacy at the origins of the Cold War. It explored a brief two-year period, beginning in summer 1945. Fluidity and contingency characterized these months that marked the end of one world conflict and the beginnings of another. By the end of these two years, in relations with the Soviet Union, once ally against Germany and now bitter rival, containment had replaced collaboration in the American policy lexicon. She discussed three main threads that were apparent through her studies: the connection between American domestic politics and foreign policy decisions; the international context of U.S. policy; and the importance of ideology in defining the Cold War world for decision-makers.

Sarah Seo - History, Princeton University

Project: The Fourth Amendment, Cars, and Freedom in Twentieth-Century America

Fellowship year: 2016

Mentor: David Sklansky, Stanford Law School

Seo has been selected as the Charles W. McCurdy Fellow in Legal History. Most scholars have explained the development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the twentieth century as an enduring struggle to limit the police’s discretionary authority to protect individual rights. But by beginning her inquiry with the automobile in American society—one of the most contested sites of the Fourth Amendment, yet the least studied—Seo’s show that the evolution in the law of searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment reflected the more difficult challenge of accommodating the police within the meaning of freedom itself. The mass production of the automobile created the greatest urban disorder at the turn of the century, and the state’s power to regulate the social chaos of the automotive society increasingly encompassed a proactive, discretionary form of policing. Seo’s project traces the implications of this shift in governance from nineteenth-century self-regulation to twentieth-century policing through Fourth Amendment car search-and-seizure cases. By prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourth Amendment governed the first point of encounters between individuals and the police. And in the twentieth century, most of those encounters happened in the context of a traffic stop. Car stops and searches thus offer an important perspective not only on how the citizen-police relationship has evolved, but also on how Americans have wrestled with the paradox of discretionary policing in a society committed to the rule of law. Ultimately, the resolution entailed a change in what it meant to live in a free society. 

Jon Shields - Political Science, University of Virginia

Project: The Democratic Virtues of Christian Right Activism

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: James Wilson

Jon Shields is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Shields's research interests include Christianity and democracy; social movements; and the politics of bioethics. 

Shields's dissertation focuses on the portrait of democratic education in Christian politics being principally complicated by the demands of political mobilization. That is, Christian leaders often need to mobilize apathetic or uninvolved citizens through more passionate exhortations before these deliberative norms can be taught at all. In fact, the culture war rhetoric that many scholars find so rampant in American politics is actually most commonly found in the context of mobilization. Shields argues that once Christian leaders have mobilized citizens, most then labor diligently to moderately and inform the passions they have provoked by encouraging activists to embrace deliberative norms before they practice public advocacy. He hypothesizes that this organizational tension, moreover, between the exigencies of mobilization and successful public activism highlights a deeper tension that democratic theorists need to confront between the ideals of a participatory and deliberative democracy.

Selected Recent Publications

The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University. with Joshua M. Dunn (Oxford University Press, 2016).

“The Real Campus Sexual Assault Problem—and How to Fix It.” with Bradford Richardson. Commentary, October 1 2015.

"Fighting Liberalism's Excesses: Moral Crusades During the Reagan Revolution." Journal of Policy History 26, no. 1 (2014).

Peter Siskind - History, University of Pennsylvania

Project: Growing Pains: Political Economy and Place on the Northeast Corridor, 1950s–1970s

Fellowship year: 2001

Mentor: Christopher Sellers, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Peter Siskind is Assistant Professor of History at Arcadia University and is the Chair of the Department of Historical and Political Studies.

Dr. Siskind specializes in American political, urban/suburban, and environmental history. He came to Arcadia in 2004 after teaching at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, from which he earned a Ph.D. in History in 2002. He earned an A.B. in Religion from Dartmouth College in 1990. Arcadia awarded him tenure in 2010.  He received his B.A. from Dartmouth University, his M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Siskind co-taught a course at the University of Pennsylvania with Governor Ed Rendell on contemporary campaigns and elections.

Dr. Siskind’s scholarship examines the contours of modern American liberalism – its evolution and internal tensions, its potential and limitations. Much of his writing has focused on the politics of land use and development in the cities, suburbs, and recreational vacationlands on the post-World War II Northeast Corridor from the metropolitan areas of Boston to Washington, D.C. He is also exploring a potential book-length work on the life of Nelson Rockefeller.

Selected Recent Publications

"Shades of Black and Green: The Making of Racial and Environmental Liberalism in Nelson Rockefeller’s New York” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (January 2008): 243-265.

Tracy Steffes - History, University of Chicago

Project: A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890-1933

Fellowship year: 2004

Mentor: Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

Tracy Steffes is Associate Professor of Education and History at Brown University.

She teaches courses on American educational history. Her research interests include the development of American education system, citizenship, social and democratic theory and practice, state-building and social movements. 

Steffe's dissertation examined the national systematization of American education as public schooling was standardized across the United States from 1880 to 1930 and formulated into a single, hierarchical system. She argued that the expansion of state authority over schooling and the growth of state-level educational administration from 1880 to 1930 enabled a national-level coordination and systematization of schooling which amounted to the origins of a national education system. While the federal government played a role in creating this system, national systematization emerged through a complicated process of cooperation and competition between private and public actors at local, state, and national levels. As states assumed greater regulatory and oversight powers over local schools, they looked to one another and to national structures for guidance in shaping their school systems, cooperating in some respects and competing in others. American schooling, like American governance more generally, was powerfully shaped by traditions of federalism and private power and thus looked and operated very differently than national systems abroad.

Selected Recent Publications

School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940. University of Chicago Press, 2012

Simon Stevens - History, Columbia University

Project: “Strategies of Struggle: International Pressure and the End of Apartheid, 1958-1994”

Fellowship year: 2015

Mentor: Saul Dubow, Queen Mary University

Simon Stevens is the Max Webber Post-doctoral Fellow in History at the European University Institute, St. John's College at the University of Cambridge.  He carried out his PhD research in the Department of History at Columbia University in New York. Previously he received his BA and MPhil in History from the University of Cambridge. Stevens was a Choate Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, and held pre-doctoral fellowships at the Center for the US and the Cold War at New York University in addition to his Miller Center National Fellowship.

Stevens will submit hisdissertation in August 2015. Entitled ‘Strategies of Struggle: Boycotts, Sanctions, and the War Against Apartheid,’ his project analyzes the role in the strategy and tactics of the global anti-apartheid movement of campaigns for consumer, sports, and cultural boycotts, governmental trade sanctions, and corporate disinvestment.  He explores the multiple shifts in how the core constituents of the anti-apartheid movement believed apartheid might be ended, and how various forms of international action might best contribute to that end.

Stevens' research interests include transnational activism and activist movements, African political and diplomatic history, American foreign relations, Britain's post-imperial international relations, decolonization, the Cold War, internationalisms, human rights, and humanitarianism. While a doctoral candidate Stevens serves as a Teaching Fellow on courses in international, African, and American history.

Simon's publications include "'From the Viewpoint of a Southern Governor': The Carter Administration and Apartheid, 1977-1981" in Diplomatic History (2012), and  "Why South Africa? The Politics of Anti-Apartheid Activism in Britain in the Long 1970s" in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, edited by Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Pennsylvania University Press, 2014). He has presented papers in venues including the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations annual meeting, the Ghana Studies Association conference, the Center for the United States and the Cold  War Seminar at New York University, the Department of Historical Studies Seminar at the University of Cape Town, and the Cold War Research Seminar at the London School of Economics.

Damion Thomas - History, University of California, Los Angeles

Project: "The Good Negroes": African-American Athletes and the Cultural Cold War, 1945–68

Fellowship year: 2002

Mentor: Jeffrey Sammons, University of North Carolina

Damion Thomas is Assistant Professor of Physical Cultural Studies and affiliate faculty in the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland.

Thomas's research interests include:  Sport and United States race relations, Black internationalism, African American popular culture, U.S. foreign relations, and Black masculinity. His book, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics, provides a transnational perspective to the study of domestic American racial affairs by examining U.S. government attempts to manipulate international perceptions of U.S. race relations during the early days of the Cold War.  As nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin American gained their independence, the State Department began to send prosperous African Americans overseas to showcase African Americans as the preeminent citizens of the African Diaspora, rather than as victims of racial oppression. Athletes were prominently featured in the State Department goodwill tours, designed to undermine anti-Americanism. However, as African-American athletes began to provide counter narratives to State Department claims about American exceptionalism—most notably during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic protest—the transatlantic relationships these tours fostered were co-opted as a means to foster African Diasporic cultural and political agendas.

Thomas's dissertation, "'The Good Negroes': African-American Athletes and the Cultural Cold War, 1945–1968," examined State Department attempts to manipulate international perceptions of United States race relations by sending African-American athletes abroad as cultural ambassadors. This project argued that the politics of symbolism associated with the African-American athletes and integrated teams were designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society during the Cold War/Civil Rights Era. The symbol of the integrated athlete allowed the government to argue that the racial order was not an impediment to the advancement of individual African Americans.

Selected Recent Publications

Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2012).

Dominique Tobbell - History of Sociology and Science, University of Pennsylvania

Project: Pharmaceutical Networks: The Political Economy of Drug Development in the United States, 1945–1980

Fellowship year: 2008

Mentor: Dan Carpenter, Harvard University

Dominique Tobbell is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

Tobbell is a historian of twentieth century medicine and biomedical science and technology with a particular interest in the history of pharmaceuticals, health policy, and academic medicine.

Tobbell's dissertation examined the drug industry's efforts to build political support for itself in the second half of the 20th century and defeat the more radical agendas of pharmaceutical reformers. Critical to this effort was the industry's strategy of offering to the medical and academic communities solutions to their shared problems. These problems included a growing manpower problem in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences and the increasing authority of the FDA – and the government more generally – over medical practice. In this way, the current political economy of drug development, and in particular the political culture that sustains it, can be seen as having evolved through the mutually beneficial relations of industry and key sectors of the biomedical community.

Selected Recent Publications

"'Coming to Grips with the Nursing Question': The Politics of Nursing Education Reform in 1960s' America." Nursing History Review 22 (2014): 37-60. 

"Plow, Town, and Gown: The Politics of Family Practice in 1960s' America." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 4 (2013).

Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and its Consequences (University of California Press, 2012).

"Pharmaceutical Politics and Regulatory Reform in Postwar America." in Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. What's Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Katherine Unterman - History, Yale University

Project: Nowhere to Hide: International Rendition and American Power

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Elizabeth Cobbs, Stanford UniversityTexas A&M University

Katherine Unterman is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

Katherine Unterman received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2011. She also holds a Masters in Legal Studies from Stanford Law School and a B.A. from Harvard University. Dr. Unterman began teaching at Texas A&M University in Fall 2011. She specializes in 19th century U.S. history, American foreign relations, and legal history. Her book manuscript, Nowhere to Hide: International Fugitives and American Power, examines the history of international manhunts and the pursuit of fugitive criminals.

Covering the 1850s through the 1930s, Unterman's dissertation chronicled the international rendition of fugitives as both a set of practices that reached American power across borders, and the cultural ideas that justified it. With extensive research on extradition, international law, and criminology, she traces the evolving mechanics of international manhunts—the treaties, technologies, and procedures that enabled American law to reach beyond its borders. Equally important, she also analyzes jurisdiction as discourse: a set of ideas and representations of a shrinking world, where someone who broke American law had nowhere to hide. She argues that law needs to be considered alongside military and economic power as a tool of U.S. informal imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Bridging domestic and international history, she explains how Americans downplayed the question of other nations' sovereignty by treating international policing as a matter of maintaining law and order at home. These late-nineteenth-century precedents were eventually institutionalized by government agencies like the FBI and DEA, and have even been used to justify the practice of extraordinary rendition today.

Selected Recent Publications

Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015)

“Boodle over the Border: Embezzlement and the Crisis of International Mobility, 1880-1890.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 2 (April 2012).

Vanessa Walker - History, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Project: Ambivalent Allies: Advocates, Diplomats, and the Struggle for an 'American' Human Rights Policy

Fellowship year: 2010

Mentor: Jeremi Suri

Vanessa Walker is the Joseph W. And Diane Zerbib Assistant Professor of History at Amherst College.

Walker's primary areas of interest are the history of U.S. foreign relations and the history and politics of human rights. With both of these topics, she likes to focus on the interchange between international and domestic spheres and actors. She approaches foreign relations in broad terms to engage ideology, race, gender, culture, and (of course) policy, as important forces in shaping the United States’ global interactions through out its history.  Moreover, she likes to explore how foreign entities—both governmental and non-governmental—have shaped the country domestically, influencing American ideals, identities, society, and government institutions. Her current book project, for example, brings together high-level diplomatic and political history with that of activist networks and social movements to argue for the centrality of Latin America in the development of U.S. human rights policies and debates in the Ford and Carter presidencies. At its core, the project is a study of how foreign policy is made in a democracy, situating diplomacy in a larger social and political domestic context, and it traces the deep and inextricable connections between international structures and policies, and domestic dissent and reform in the 1970s. Although her primary focus is on the United States, Walker has also done research in Latin America and the Middle East, and enjoys offering comparative and transnational courses rooted in broader global contexts, such as seminars on Cuba and the United States and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Walker's dissertation examined the interactions between advocacy groups and foreign diplomats in the 1970s and early 1980s, revealing the way human rights policy was conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated. Highlighting the role that Chilean and Argentine advocates played in catalyzing the emerging human rights movement in Washington, D.C., her dissertation sought to place this advocacy-diplomacy relationship in its proper international context. More broadly, Walker considered how the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations approached human rights as a component of the U.S. relations with Latin America. Her dissertation placed particular emphasis on the Carter administration's relations with Chile and Argentina, and reevaluated its successes and failures in the context of a larger human rights moment, and its objectives to redirect U.S. foreign policy away from Cold War containment and intervention.

Selected Recent Publications

“At the End of Influence: Rethinking Human Rights and Intervention in U.S.-Latin American Relations.” Journal of Contemporary History, 46, No. 1 (January 2011): 109-135.

“Critically Relevant and Genuinely Critical.” In "Fifty Years of William Appleman Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy: An Anniversary, a Discussion, and a Celebration,” Passport, 40, No. 2 (September 2009): 35-6.

Kevin Wallsten - Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Project: Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them: An Analysis of the Who's, What's and Why's of Political Blogging

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: Michael Schudson, Columbia University

Kevin Wallsten is Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University in Long Beach.

Despite the recent explosion in blogging, there have been relatively few empirical studies of the political blogging phenomenon. Wallsten's research project situated the role of political blogs in the American political system by addressing four sets of interrelated questions. First, who blogs and why? Second, do political bloggers use their blogs primarily as "soapboxes" (meaning they are expressions of personal opinions), "transmission belts" (meaning they simply provide links to websites or quote sources with little or no commentary from the blogger), "mobilizers" (meaning they are calls to action) or "listening posts" (meaning they elicit feedback from their audience)? Third, to the extent that these actors use their blogs as soapboxes for expressing their opinions, what is the content of this political expression? Finally, what impact are political blogs having on public discourse, mainstream media coverage and the policy making process? Taken together, the answers to these questions shed light on what the emergence of political blogs means for the quality and functioning of democracy in the United States.

Selected Recent Publications

"Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. Here’s the evidence." with Tatishe M. Nteta and Lauren A. McCarthy, The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post (December 30, 2015)

"Why American Catholics may not be persuaded by Pope Francis’s message on immigration." with Tatishe Nteta, The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post (September 27, 2015) 

"It’s time to end anonymous comments sections." with Melinda Tarsi, The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post (August 19, 2014).

“Old Media, New Media Sources: The Blogosphere’s Influence on Print Media News Coverage.” International Journal of E-Politics 4, no. 2 (July 2013). 

Derek Webb - Political Science, University of Notre Dame

Project: Paving the Rights Infrastructure: Civic Education in the Presidencies of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt

Fellowship year: 2007

Mentor: William Galston, The Brookings Institution

Derek Webb is Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University

Webb joined the Constitutional Law Center as a fellow in 2012.  He works in the fields of constitutional law, statutory interpretation, American political theory, and legal history.  His publications include articles in Law and History Review, the American Journal of Legal History, and the South Carolina Law Review, as well as a co-authored book about Anti-Federalists in New York.  Derek is the winner of the Warren E. Burger Prize from the American Inns of Court and the William B. Spong Moot Court Tournament at William and Mary Law School.  After receiving his B.A. in philosophy from Yale University, he earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame and a J.D. from Georgetown University.  He has held research and teaching fellowships at the University of Virginia and Princeton University and summer clerkships in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.  In 2014 and 2015, Derek was a Supreme Court Fellowship in the Office of the Counselor to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

Through a comparative study of civic education in the presidencies of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, Webb extended and challenged the role of "liberal virtues" in American politics. In his dissertation, Webb extended the thesis that liberalism requires a range of civic virtues. Webb showed how different kinds of rights have required fundamentally different kinds of citizen virtue for their support. Challenging the thesis that liberalism embodies a comprehensive and self-sustaining conception of the good life, Webb showed how liberal ends have occasionally been achieved through reliance upon the moral ideals of complementary yet distinct non-liberal traditions.

Selected Recent Publications

Fitting Together Uneven Planks: The Constitution and the Spirit of Compromise, Constitution Daily, February 25, 2013.

Doubting a Little of One's Infallibility: The Real Miracle at Philadelphia, Constitution Daily, January 18, 2013.

The "Spirit of Amity": The Constitution's Cover Letter and Civic Friendship, Constitution Daily, December 13, 2012.

Justin Wert - Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Project: The Not-So-Great Writ: Habeas Corpus & American Political Development

Fellowship year: 2005

Mentor: Gary Gerstle, Vanderbilt University

Justin Wert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma

His research interests include Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, American Political Development and American Political Thought. 

In Wert's dissertation, he analyzed the institutional development of Habeas Corpus law in four time periods: ante-bellum slave law; Reconstruction; the 20th century debates over the applicability ("Incorporation") of the Bill of Rights to the states; and habeas corpus during war, particularly the current prosecution of the "War on Terror." The writ of habeas corpus – "The most important human right in the Constitution" according to Zecharia Chafee – must be re-examined in the 21st century according to its etymological roots. Wert argued that habeas corpus has always been inextricably linked to shifting notions of American citizenship, moving from state to national, and then again to state conceptions of citizenship, with the respect to meaningful access to the "Great Writ." The origins of this divide can be found in the enduring, yet shifting, conceptions of state versus national citizenship in the American state.

Selected Recent Publications

Habeas Corpus in America: The Politics of Individual Rights (University Press of Kansas, 2011).

The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act. with Charles S. Bullock, III & Keith Gaddie (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)

"Benedick v. Beatrice: Citizens United and the Reign of the Laggard Court." with Charles S. Bullock and Ronald Keith Gaddie, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (Spring 2011).

“With a Little Help from a Friend: Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta After Runnymede.” PS: Political Science and Politics (2010)

James G. Wilson - History, University of Virginia

Project: Bolts from the Blue: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the End of the Cold War

Fellowship year: 2011

Mentor: Jeremi Suri

James Graham Wilson is a Historian at the U.S. Department of State.

He received his B.A. from Vassar College in 2003, and subsequently worked as a research assistant to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. He has presented portions of his dissertation in Rome, Geneva, Cologne, and Amsterdam, and has received the U.Va Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the Humanities & Social Sciences as well as the U.Va Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. Recent articles have appeared in Diplomacy and Statecraft, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of American Studies.

James's first book, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War was published by Cornell University Press in 2013.  It was based upon his dissertation, which drew upon fresh archival evidence that illuminates decision-making in Washington and Moscow during the last ten years of the Cold War. It contends that policymakers neither formulated a strategy for victory nor even articulated what victory meant—at least until the Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989; that the revolutions of 1989-1990 were made possible by broad historical forces such as changes in the international economy and the nascent information age; and that the twilight struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully because of Gorbachev's devotion to new thinking, new faces, and the Soviet leader's (ill-founded) belief that he could reconfigure communism to adapt to a new era.

Selected Recent Publications

"Key Figures at the End of the Cold War." C-Span Discussion, April 28, 2014.

The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013)

McGee Young - Political Science, Syracuse University

Project: Therapy and Poverty: Private Social Service in the Area of Public Welfare

Fellowship year: 2003

Mentor: Elizabeth Sanders, Cornell University

McGee Young is Head of Product at Open Energy Efficiency.

Previously, Young taught in American politics with a specialty in political organizations and public policy at Marquette University. He is also the Founder and CEO of MeterHero, a software platform for tracking water and energy data. He was a winner of the Midwest Social Innovation Prize, a finalist in the Clean Energy Challenge, and his company was selected for the inaugural class of the Global Freshwater Seed Accelerator. Prior to MeterHero, Young founded H2Oscore, a web-based portal for water utilities to help promote conservation. He previously served as the Faculty Entrepreneur Fellow in the Kohler Center for Entrepreneurship in the School of Business. In 2014, he was named as one of Milwaukee's "40 under 40" by the Milwaukee Business Journal. 

Young's dissertation examined the development of the small business and environmental lobbies through the prism of 20th century American political development. He analyzed the relationship between the strategies and tactics of interest groups and the structure of political opportunities. Young additionally argued that political constraints placed on groups by preceding institutional and political configurations, together with the relationship between groups and political parties as well as groups' own internal organizational struggles, shape the capacity for groups to influence the political process.

Selected Recent Publications

"From Conservation to Environment: The Sierra Club and the Organizational Politics of Change." Studies in American Political Development 22, no. 2 (2008): 183-203.

"The Political Roots of Small Business Identity." Polity 40, no. 2 (2008): 436-463.

Emily Zackin - Politics, Princeton University

Project: Positive Rights in the Constitutions of the United States

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: Tom Burke, Wellesley College

Emily Zackin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University.

Zackin's research interests include constitutional law and civil liberties, American political and constitutional development, social movements, constitutional theory, and American political thought.  Her book Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights was published by Princeton University Press in 2013.

As a Miller Center fellow in 2008-09, Zackin's dissertation examined the long tradition of positive rights in American politics, focusing specifically on movements directed at amending state constitutions. She examined three movements from different historical periods (education rights, labor rights, and victims' rights), each of which resulted in widespread constitutional activism at the state level. Zackin argued that even if we accept the conventional distinction between positive and negative rights, the American constitutional tradition still includes positive rights. Her research demonstrated that, although state constitutions are more detailed and less enduring than the U.S. constitution, they are recognizably constitutional and trump both legislatures and courts, thereby allowing activists to mobilize around them to change government policy.

Selected Recent Publications

Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights (Princeton University Press, 2013).

“American Constitutional Exceptionalism Revisited” with Mila Versteeg, University of Chicago Law Review 81, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 1641-1707.

"Kentucky’s Constitutional Crisis and the Many Meanings of Judicial Independence." Studies in Law, Politics & Society 58 (2012): 73-99.

"What’s Happened to American Federalism?" (Review Essay) Polity 43, no. 3 (July 2011): 388–403.

Anne Mariel Zimmerman - Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia

Project: Special Relationships, Dollars, and Development: U.S. Foreign Aid and State-Building Egypt, Jordan, South Korea, and Taiwan

Fellowship year: 2009

Mentor: John Waterbury

Anne Peters is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University.

In Peters's dissertation, she aimed to explain the relationship among U.S. aid, regime stability, and economic outcomes. She argued that weak institutional legacies and disparate regime coalitions have compelled Jordanian and Egyptian elites to undertake a strategy of redistribution of aid, distorting state institutions and driving up the real exchange rate, while unified coalitions and strong institutional legacies allowed Taiwanese and Korean elites to marshal aid funds toward the creation of developmental institutions. Peters provided a much-needed description of the coalitional politics of foreign aid in Egypt and Jordan, and emphasized the importance of political feasibility when formulating U.S. aid strategies.

Selected Recent Publications

“Why Obama Shouldn’t Increase Democracy Aid to Egypt.” Foreign Policy, 14 February 2011.
“Protests in Egypt: the real reason for Obama’s Two-Handed Game.” The Christian Science Monitor, 31 January 2011.

2017 Fellows

Emily Baer - Political Science, University of Minnesota

Project: "Party Factions and the Roots of Institutional Change in Congress: The Democratic Study Group and Liberal Democrats' Campaign to Reform the House of Representatives (1959-1994)"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Sarah Binder, George Washington University/Brookings Institution

Emily Baer' project addresses how factions within political parties promote policy and leadership change in the U.S. Congress through institutional reform. Congress is frequently criticized as an institution structured by rules and norms which make policy and leadership changes among its members difficult. Leaders are often slow to respond when policy preferences within parties change, a new group or constituency emerges, or elections reveal policy shifts among the public. The relative impermeability of parties to new ideas and leaders poses a significant problem for democratic representation and responsiveness within parties. This dissertation approaches these issues through a case study of the Democratic Study Group (DSG), the faction of liberal Democrats in the House from 1959-1994 and leader of the 1970s “reform era.” Liberals organized DSG out of their frustration with party leaders’ inability to overcome the power of southern conservative committee chairs, ultimately leading to a series of reforms significantly redistributing power between the Democratic leadership, committee chairs, and individual members. Today, this historic effort has taken on a renewed importance as a new faction – the Republican Freedom Caucus (analyzed as a comparative case) – has emerged to challenge the balance of power between junior members and party leaders.  But while the 1970s reform era is widely recognized for increasing representation and responsiveness in the Democratic Caucus, we know little about how a faction was empowered to lead the reform effort. In Baer' dissertation, she questions and analyzes using original archival research and in-depth interviews with former Members of Congress and their staffers: How do political parties respond to the changing preferences of their members? How does the rise of a new faction shape power in parties? And how can factions overcome the institutional hurdles to reforming rules and procedures, and expanding party leadership pathways and policy agendas? Baer has accepted an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship beginning in November, 2017.

Fritz Bartel - History, Cornell University

Project: "The Privatization of the Cold War: Global Finance and the Fall of Communism"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Daniel Sargent, University of California, Berkeley

Fritz Bartel’s dissertation examines the growth of communist states’ sovereign debt to Western banks and governments from the 1973 oil crisis through the end of the Cold War. Between 1970 and 1989, the Eastern Bloc accumulated over $90 billion of sovereign debt to Western banks and governments.  The core argument of the project is that this sovereign debt – and the bankers and policymakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who managed it – decisively influenced the end of the Cold War.  Through studies of the financial history of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, the project tracks the growth of Western financial power in the Eastern Bloc.  Based on extensive archival research across Europe and North America, it demonstrates the significant role that this Western financial power played in the years of transition from communism to democratic capitalism.  In so doing, The Privatization of the Cold War analyzes the rise of financial capitalism and the end of the Cold War as part of the same global history.  It is a history that illuminates the powerful role of non-state financial actors, as well as the challenges that global financial markets present to democratic governance, state sovereignty, and labor movements.

Ananda Burra - History, University of Michigan

Project: "Petitioning the Mandates: Anticolonial and Antiracist Publics in International Law"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania

Burra has been selected as the Charles W. McCurdy Fellow in Legal History

Drawing on an interdisciplinary training in law and history, Ananda Burra’s dissertation is the first systematic legal-historical study of how transnational anticolonial and antiracist solidarity movements shaped the international law of individual protection and colonial rule in the mid-20th century. In particular, this dissertation examines how anticolonial activists, colonial officials, and members of the newly-formed international bureaucracy in the League of Nations and the United Nations negotiated a language of grassroots international protest, one based around the practice of individuals petitioning international organizations about colonial abuse. African American activists were particularly active in this field, framing their involvement in the Mandates as a protest against racial discrimination, turning a mirror on the United States’ own racial politics. Petitioning in the interwar and immediate post-war years thus shows us how inter-continental forms of protest could be deployed in fighting what States saw as primarily local battles. These battles spanned the period from 1920 until at least 1956, when the International Court of Justice engaged with the history and jurisprudence of the individual right to petition in international law. As such, Burra’s work engages historiographical debates in global history, histories of international institutions and human rights, histories of transnational social movements and decolonization, and histories of the United States in the world. By focusing on the role of non-State actors in international institutions, Burra’s dissertation also questions the consensus on the minor role played by non-white actors in international law-making before and immediately after the Second World War.

Christopher Cimaglio - Communications, University of Pennsylvania

Project: "Contested Majority: The Representation of the White Working Class in US Politics from the 1930s to the 1990s"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Jefferson Cowie

“Contested Majority” examines how American politicians, journalists, pollsters, academics, social movement groups, and others have studied, written about, and claimed to speak for white working class people and how this work has shaped American politics. While popular and scholarly accounts of the rise and decline of liberalism and the rise of conservatism in the twentieth century US have often given the white working class a very prominent role (for instance, as the New Deal’s popular base and the forefront of the white reaction that provided an electoral majority for conservatives), this work sometimes frames the white working class as a homogenous group with uniform political views—centered, since the late 1960s, on cultural and racial conservatism.  Placing primary emphasis on how white workers have been represented in national politics and media and those who have represented them, “Contested Majority” offers a different angle on a familiar story.  It traces how prominent understandings of white working class politics, identity, and culture—from a militant, progressive working class combating economic royalists to culturally conservative and racially anxious “Middle Americans” and “Reagan Democrats” opposed to liberal elites—emerged, circulated, impacted political contestation, and shaped elite decision-making.  In doing so, “Contested Majority” points to the power of the white working class majority as a political symbol, one that has consistently featured in debate around fundamental issues in American politics, including the legitimacy of capitalism, unions, challenges to prevailing understandings of race, gender, and class, and an activist state combating inequality.

David Dagan - Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

Project: "Building the Big House: American Institutions and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, 1980-1995"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Kimberly Johnson, Columbia University

David Dagan’s dissertation examines the rise of mass incarceration in the United States as a project of state-building—a major expansion of government authority and capacity. While scholars have typically associated American state-building with centralization and particularly with the expansion of social policy, Dagan emphasizes the role of decentralization and the expansion of penal policy.

Dagan argues that mass incarceration was spurred by “interdependent fragmentation” – the condition that American governing authority is split both vertically and horizontally, even while policy responsibility is shared across those levels. This combination provided policy makers with substantial buck-passing opportunities that exacerbated punitive electoral dynamics and weakened moderating influences, particularly by putting off a reckoning with prison crowding and costs. Dagan shows these dynamics at work in Pennsylvania and Texas, where prosecutors fought pitched battles against judges and jailers throughout the 1980s, centered on the problem of prison crowding.

Dagan also traces the flow of tough-on-crime rhetoric back and forth between Washington, D.C., and the states. He argues that federal leadership was important in the rise of mass incarceration, even absent significant centralization. This leadership occurred through professional networks, which diffused ideologies and technologies of punishment to the decision makers sitting at the policy levers—state and local officials.

The project helps to link the analysis of rhetoric, policy choices, and outcomes in the mass-incarceration literature. It contributes to a new understanding of the American state by showing that fragmentation enables and even drives the particular brand of state power Dagan dubs coercive capacity.

Jeannette Estruth - History, New York University

Project: "A Political History of the Silicon Valley: Structural Change, Urban Transformation, and Local Movements, 1945-1995"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Mark Brilliant, University of California, Berkeley

Jeannette Estruth has been selected as the Miller Center/ Hagley Library Dissertation Fellow in Business and Politics.

It has become accepted wisdom that the history of Silicon Valley represents something universal about the power of technology to transform national and global economies in the twenty-first century. While acknowledging the influence of the Valley on technologies like computing, telecommunications, and surveillance, Jeannette Estruth’s dissertation takes a wider view, interrogating the relationships between the politics of urban development, labor organizing, and social inclusion to understand how the technology industry became synonymous with California’s South Bay Area in the postwar period. By drawing from a variety of archival sources-- oral histories, corporate memos, activist pamphlets, and union newspapers-- it argues that debates over land use, race, gender, labor, and the urban environment shaped the technology industry’s growth in the Valley in the twentieth century. Estruth posits that local claims to economic inclusion and the concurrent rise of the technology industry combined to produce a new normative political discourse by the 1990s. Defining this impulse as “techno-libertarianism,” she asks how an industry with its roots in federal defense spending came to see itself in opposition to the state; how the culture of participatory entrepreneurship sought to replace the culture of participatory left politics as the hallmark of progressivism; and how the collectivist ideals of the local political left were appropriated into a global promise of universal human liberation through market technologies. By uniting the technological history of the Silicon Valley with its urban and political history, her project prompts new understandings of the emergence of global economies in the postwar period.

Leif Fredrickson - History, University of Virginia

Project: "The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Development, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment"

Fellowship year: 2017

Leif Fredrickson has been selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

Leif Fredrickson's dissertation seeks to answer two questions. First, how did twentieth-century metropolitan development affect lead exposure? To answer this, Fredrickson examines how policies and markets came together to affect energy, housing, and transportation infrastructures that led to increased and often disproportionate exposure from lead in sources such as paint, gasoline and batteries. His second question is: How did lead exposure affect individuals, communities and governments in the metropolis? To answer this, Fredrickson examines how lead affected education, income, medical expenses and other social outcomes for individuals, and how those effects in turn shaped the outcomes of families and communities. He argues that these effects contributed to the long-term inequalities we see across classes, “races,” and metropolitan areas (i.e., the suburbs and the inner city). Fredrickson also looks at how victims and their families and communities dealt with these problems, proactively and retroactively. Finally, Fredrickson examines how the ramifying effects of lead challenged local governments, who faced expensive measures to eradicate lead poisoning but also expensive costs from failing to eradicate lead problems.   

Charles Halvorson - History, Columbia University

Project: "Valuing the Air: The Politics of Environmental Regulation from the Clean Air Act to Carbon Trading"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Dan Carpenter, Harvard University

Charles Halvorson has been selected as the 2016 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellow.

Fifty years ago, the environmental movement convinced Americans that strong regulations were needed to protect human health and the natural world against the compounding detritus of industrial society. Meanwhile, environmental economists offered a different solution: let markets value the environment by pricing the social effects of degradation. Congress went with the environmentalists, passing legislation in the early 1970s to protect the public health from noxious emissions and effluents, regardless of the costs involved.

But as the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) quickly discovered, defending major regulatory interventions against an onslaught of criticism from regulated industries required environmental advocates to convincingly establish the economic benefits of environmental protection. Over the 1970s, EPA officials invested millions of dollars in staffing economists at the agency and funding critical new research on the pecuniary benefits of regulatory protection at universities across the country. In the late 1970s, the agency began experimenting with emission trading and other market and economic incentive programs, putting EPA at the forefront of the larger regulatory reform movement.  

By leaning on cost/benefit analysis to justify regulations and turning to market trading to lower the costs of enforcement, EPA contributed to the ascendance of economics in policymaking. Yet by simultaneously rejecting economists’ calls to let markets price the environment, EPA preserved into the present the political salience of the moral and romantic values of 1970s environmentalism. 

Patrick O’Brien - Political Science, Yale University

Project: "The Unitary Executive as an Historical Variable: Presidential Control and Public Finance"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin College

Patrick O'Brien's dissertation, “The Unitary Executive as an Historical Variable: Presidential Control and Public Finance,” examines the policy domain of public finance – broadly defined to include expenditures, receipts, and money and banking or, in modern terms, fiscal policy and monetary policy – in order to demonstrate that presidential control over administration varies in broad historical patterns. Specifically, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, O'Brien provides an overview of four historical systems of administration for public finance, describing what he terms the New Deal era apparatus (1933-1980) and the Reagan era apparatus (1981-present) during the modern period and the Founding era apparatus (1789-1828) and the Jackson era apparatus (1829-1860) during the early period. Moreover, O'Brien shows how presidential control varies not only across eras but also within eras, unfolding as a process of innovation, stabilization, and constraint.

The theory and findings from O'Brien's dissertation call into question the foundation of the unitary executive framework, the leading political science approach to studying the presidency. Rather than assume that all presidents maintain the same, fixed structural advantages relative to the other branches of government – a first-mover advantage, a collective-action advantage, and an informational advantage – and then focus on standard political variables such as party control of the presidency, congressional support, and popular support, he provides a theory that explains why these very structural advantages change over time. Additionally, O'Brien demonstrates empirically that a change in structural advantages is a stronger indicator of a change in policy than are any of the standard political variables. 

Amanda Rothschild - Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project: "Courage First: Dissent, Debate, and the Origins of US Responsiveness to Mass Killing"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: Michael Barnett

Amanda Rothschild’s dissertation, “Courage First: Dissent, Debate, and the Origins of US Responsiveness to Mass Killing,” proposes a novel theory explaining US policy in response to mass killing. Rothschild argues that the most critical factors historically responsible for shaping US policy include the degree of congressional pressure for action, the level at which dissent occurs within the government, and the extent to which the president views the atrocities as a political burden. To develop her theory, Rothschild investigates the policies of seven presidential administrations regarding five cases of mass killing: the Armenian Genocide of 1915; the Holocaust from 1938 to 1945; mass killings in Bangladesh in 1971; atrocities in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995; and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. The presidential administrations under examination include the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and William Clinton. In developing her case studies, Rothschild draws on primary source documents from eight archives across the United States and on several oral history interviews. Her conclusions highlight the enduring role of dissent in shaping US policy on mass killing, the significance of individual leaders in international relations, and the critical relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy. Rothschild's findings not only provide new historical data and theoretical insights relevant to academic literature in political science, international relations, international security, and diplomatic history, but also offer novel ideas for understanding present day debates on US foreign policy, atrocity prevention, and human rights. 

Matthew Scroggs - Politics, University of Virginia

Project: "Democracies Under Fire: How Democratic Targets and Allies Respond to Coercive Threats"

Fellowship year: 2017

Mentor: William Wohlforth, Dartmouth College

Matt Scroggs received his PhD from the University of Virginia's Department of Politics. He successfully defended his dissertation titled, "Democracies Under Fire: How Democratic Targets and Allies Respond to Coercive Threats"  in March 2017. His research interests include coercive diplomacy and threats in international relations, American foreign policy, and international relations theory. He will be starting as a visiting assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in the fall.