UPDATES

Craig Calhoun, former director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has joined Arizona State University as University Professor of Social Sciences.

Lois Harder, former chairwoman of the University of Alberta’s Department of Political Science, has been named head of Peter Lougheed Leadership College.

Gregory A. Huber, former full professor of political science at Yale University, has been named Forst Family Professor of Political Science.

Jeffrey Kraus, former assistant professor of political science and vice provost of Wagner College, has been appointed provost.

Alemayehu G. Mariam, professor of political science at Cal State, San Bernardino, has been selected as an Alumni of Notable Achievement by his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.

Jason Nichols, professor of political science at Northeastern University, has won the Democratic nomination for the 2nd Congressional District of Oklahoma and will compete for the seat in the November general election.

David J. Plazek, former associate professor of political science at Northern Vermont University, has been promoted to professor of political science.

Lily Tsai, associate professor of political science at MIT, has received a Committed to Caring Award from MIT’s Office of Graduate Education for her mentorships.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, has established an endowed lecture series, “The Kamieniecki Lecture in US Environmental Policy” in Sheldon Kamieniecki’s name, dean emeritus of the Division of Social Science.

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Clarke and Gray Named Foreign Policy Research Institute Fellows

Colin P. Clarke, political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Julia Gray, associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, have each been granted fellowships with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, named the nation’s top think tank with a budget under $5 million. Founded in 1955 by Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, FPRI is devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance US national interests.

Clarke was named senior fellow under the Program in National Security, where his research will focus on terrorism, insurgency, and criminal networks. At RAND, Clarke has directed studies on ISIS financing, the future of terrorism and transnational crime, and lessons learned from all insurgencies between the end of WWII and 2009. He is also an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty, and a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches courses on terrorism, insurgency, and the future of warfare.

Clarke has briefed his research at a range of national and international security forums and has testified before Congress several times as an expert witness on terrorism. He appears frequently in the media and is the author of Terrorism, Inc.: The Financing of Terrorism, Insurgency, and Irregular Warfare, published in 2015 by Praeger Security International and is currently working on Terrorism: The Essential Reference Guide, also by Praeger and due to be published this year. He received his PhD in international security policy from the University of Pittsburgh.

Gray was also named to the position of senior fellow, in which she will specialize in international relations with a focus on international political economy. She received her PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles; MSc with distinction in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics. Her research centers on international economic relations and economic organizations in emerging markets. Her book The Company States Keep: International Economic Organizations and Investor Perceptions in Emerging Markets was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and was awarded the 2013 Lepgold Book Prize for the best book published in international relations. In 2013–2014, she was a visiting scholar at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. She is currently working on a second book manuscript on implementation and adaptation in international economic organizations over time.

Adapted from the FPRI news release.

Sarah Zukerman Daly Awarded 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship

Sarah Zukerman Daly, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies is one of 31 nationwide recipients of 2018 Andrew Carnegie fellowships.

Each Carnegie fellow receives up to $200,000 toward the funding of significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities.

“I am extremely honored to receive this support for my research,” said Daly, whose research considers issues of postwar violence and elections with a regional focus on Latin America. “For me, it is humbling and invigorating for my work to receive this award.”

Daly’s second book project, which will be supported by the Carnegie award, seeks to explain a surprising feature of post-conflict environments around the world—after suffering wartime atrocities and winning peace, millions of people around the world elect to live under the rule of political actors with deep roots in the violent organizations of the past.

Her book will analyze why citizens vote in this counterintuitive fashion and what the implications of these elections are for efforts at successful peacebuilding and democratization. Daly will use cross-national, subnational and individual-level statistical analysis, experimental survey data, in-depth interviews, field observations and archival research to understand political life after war.

“My research seeks to generate solutions to significant challenges of violence, criminality, and coercive governance in the developing world,” she said, “and to offer decision-makers recommendations for creating lasting peace and democracy.”

Adapted from the University of Notre Dame news release.

Claudine Gay Named Harvard Dean

Claudine Gay, former professor of government, professor of African and African American studies, and dean of the Division of Social Science at Harvard University, was named the next dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and took office in mid-August.

Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, is the first woman and the first person of color to hold the position since its inception in the early 1940s.

Gay received her BA in Economics from Stanford University before traveling across the country to earn her PhD from Harvard’s Government department. She then returned to Stanford, working as an assistant professor and later a tenured associate professor in the school’s political science department—where she also served as the director of undergraduate studies—before coming to Harvard in 2006.

As FAS dean, Gay oversees the university’s largest faculty and works closely with Harvard president Lawrence Bacow as she heads a school that the president previously described as “the center of Harvard’s academic enterprise.”

In his intial announcement, Bacow wrote that Gay is “an eminent political scientist, an admired teacher and mentor, and an experienced leader with a talent for collaboration and a passion for academic excellence.”

“She radiates a concern for others, and for how what we do here can help improve lives far beyond our walls. I am confident she will lead the FAS with the vitality and the values that characterize universities at their best,” he wrote.

Gay inherits a number of challenges including the ongoing project to renovate Harvard’s undergraduate Houses and the opening of a second campus in the Allston nieghnorhood of Boston in 2020. She will also face financial difficulties stemming from the university’s years of poor endowment returns—and she will confront a graduate student body that recently unionized for the first time in Harvard history.

Gay said she plans to spend her first few months as FAS dean having conversations with other parts of FAS. She said her priorities will likely emerge from those conversations.

“Ours is an incredibly diverse community and so without listening and learning, it’s impossible for any agenda to take shape,” Gay said. “The one thing I can say for sure about my agenda will be is that whatever I choose to focus on, it’s going to be informed by some basic value commitments that I have that have really shaped my work in the division—so commitments to transparency and equity and diversity.”

Gay previously served on FAS’s Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the FAS Committee on General Education, and as a Radcliffe Fellow. She is also the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which seeks to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to study issues of inequality. Gay said she plans to continue pursuing her work in the Initiative and that her new role will grant her a “new vantage point.”

“One of the priorities that I’ve had over the last year and a half for the division has been doing work to elevate the teaching and research that we do on equality,” Gay said. “For a lot of the work we’ve been doing on the initiative, the center of gravity has really been in the social sciences, and it’ll be great to start looking more broadly at other parts of the FAS.”

Adapted from the Harvard Crimson’s announcement.

Cederman Awarded the Marcel Benoist Swiss Science Prize

Lars-Erik Cederman, Professor of International Conflict Research at the ETH Zurich, has been awarded the 2018 Marcel Benoist Swiss Science Prize, the most prestigious science prize awarded in Switzerland, for his theoretical and empirical work. A conflict researcher, Cederman’s research demonstrates that regional autonomy for ethnic minorities and their involvement in political decisions are central to achieving lasting peace.

In recent years, Cederman has specifically explored the relationship between inequality and conflict; he and his research group have compiled a global dataset on ethnic groups covering their opportunities to share in government power in the period from 1946 to 2017. Inequalities between ethnic groups were measured using surveys of experts and satellite images, before being plotted on a digital map. The data collection is available to politicians, academics and members of the public (https://icr.ethz.ch/data/).

Cederman was born in Sweden in 1963, and has Swedish-Swiss dual nationality. He studied technical physics at Uppsala University and international relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan in 1994. He then researched and taught at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the University of Oxford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard University. He has been at the ETH Zurich since 2003.

Adapted from the Marcel Benoist Award news release.

Tettey Appointed Vice President & Principal of the University of Toronto, Scarborough

Wisdom Tettey, a political scientist who is a leading researcher on the African diaspora, politics and media, has been appointed the new vice-president and principal of the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Tettey was formerly the dean of arts and sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan for seven years, initially leading the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and then the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. Prior to UBC, he spent 13 years at the University of Calgary and before that was at Queen’s University, where he received his PhD in political studies and began his academic career.

“I am delighted at the opportunity to be part of the U of T, Scarborough community,” Tettey said. “Being part of a community where there is a passion for socially and globally conscious scholarship, as well as teaching and learning, where the desire for the cultivation of global citizenship is reflected in various activities that the campus is engaged in, and where colleagues are making significant contributions to the overall direction of the University of Toronto–that was appealing to me.”

The author of several publications on Africa–including on the political economy of globalization and information technology; media, politics and civic engagement; African higher education; and the African diaspora–Tettey has looked at addressing the brain drain from the continent. In 2005, he was the lead investigator on a World Bank study on faculty retention in African universities and, last year, he received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) award to look at human rights issues for people affected with albinism.

Tettey hopes to tap into experiences from UBC Okanagan as he works with faculty and staff to develop U of T Scarborough’s priorities for the next five years. That includes continuing to build connections with the community around U of T, Scarborough, building on the campus’s history of community engagement and partnerships.

He hopes to be able to use his own international experiences to encourage a global focus among students. As an undergraduate student at the University of Ghana studying political science and Russian, Tettey spent his third year in Moscow at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost programs. Soon after, he came to Canada as an international student to pursue a master’s degree in political science.

At U of T Scarborough, the campus’s student body is made up of people from 115 different countries who actively participate in study abroad programs. Tettey sees huge potential to build on that diversity – creating more opportunities for domestic and foreign students to collaborate, as well as expanding international opportunities for students.

“As we train our students for the world, we need to make sure that they are imbued with the qualities and competencies that are needed to effectively engage the world.”

He also wants to focus on creating further collaborations between U of T, Scarborough and the other two campuses–U of T, Mississauga and the downtown Toronto campus–and building research opportunities across disciplines.

Adapted from the University of Toronto news release.