Jeffrey Kraus, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Wagner College, will serve as Interim Provost during the spring 2014 semester.
Bernard L. Fraga, an APSA Minority Fellows Program alum (2008–09), received his PhD in government and social policy from Harvard University in May 2013 and is now assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His primary areas of focus are American political behavior, electoral politics, and race, ethnicity, and politics. He recently coauthored with Eitan D. Hersh “Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections” in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science 5 (4): 339–56.
Shane Gleason successfully defended his dissertation on the amicus curiae role of state attorney generals at the University of Southern Illinois. Shane, a research and teaching assistant over the last five years, has published several works on state politics, public law, and judicial behavior. He has also presented at several conferences across the United States.
David Schultz, professor of politcal science, Hamline University, was awarded the 2013 Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award. The NASPAA Excellence in Teaching Award recognizes faculty members at NASPAA institutions who make outstanding contributions to public service education through excellence in teaching over a sustained period. In 2001, this award was renamed in honor of the 2000 recipient, Leslie A. Whittington, of Georgetown University, who perished at the Pentagon on American Flight 77, on September 11, 2001.
Shaun Williams-Wyche, an APSA Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (2005) alum and an APSA Minority Fellow (2007–08), defended his dissertation last month and received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in January 2014. He also published “An Empirical Test of Presidentialism’s Effect on Party Competition” in Electoral Studies 33: 166–74.
Teppei Yamamoto, assistant professor of political science, MIT, received the “Editor’s Choice” award from Political Analysis for “Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments,” coauthored with Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins. This award is given to one or two articles per year that “the editors see as providing an especially significant contribution to political methodology.”
Vavreck and Nyhan Join New Team at New York Times
Lynn Vavreck, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Brendan Nyhan, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, are joining a new team of reporters, analysts, and other contributors who will be posting to a new data-driven politics and policy website in the New York Times. Launching this spring, the website’s goal is to “use a conversational style to demystify politics, economics, health care, and other issues,” wrote David Leonhardt of the Times in an announcement. “We will publish a steady stream of pieces on a website within nytimes.com, some of which will run in the paper, and also create many graphics and interactive tools.”
Vavreck, left, is known for relying on sophisticated statistical analyses to parse data. She has written several pieces for The Times and is the author, with John Sides, of The Gamble, a book about the 2012 presidential campaign.
Nyhan, right, is also a media critic for the Columbia Journalism Review and coauthor of the 2004 bestseller, All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth.”
Other writers will include Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian who is the author of nine books, including the 2011 bestseller, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, and Justin Wolfers, a frequent op-ed author and professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan, Harvard University, will write about economics, poverty, and other topics. He is coauthor, with Eldar Shafir, of the recent book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
This new endeavor is launched following the July departure of popular blogger Nate Silver to join ESPN. His blog at the Times, “FiveThirtyEight,” attracted considerable attention during the 2012 presidential election.
Gavin Tapped First Frank Stanton Chair
MIT Political Science and its interdisciplinary Security Studies Program (part of the Center for International Studies) have been deeply engaged with understanding nuclear proliferation, deterrence, and arms control, and their complex relationships with traditional political issues since the 1970s. They mark a major extension in 2014 with the appointment of Francis Gavin as the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Policy Studies, on the strength of a $5 million endowment from the Stanton Foundation.
“We’re in a renaissance of nuclear studies now, and MIT is at the center of it —a majority of the scholars whose work I most admire have come from this program,” says Gavin, who joins the Institute after 14 years at the University of Texas at Austin where he launched and led the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and served as the first Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
Gavin earned PhD and masters degrees from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a masters from Oxford and bachelors from the University of Chicago, and has held numerous fellowships, including posts at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Center for International Affairs, and a senior research fellowship at the Nobel Institute in Norway. He began work at MIT in January, and is planning to teach graduate and undergraduate classes on nuclear politics and history, as well as international security and US foreign policy.
