Be Stone is Assistant Professor of Politics and Law, teaching courses in American politics, public policy, and qualitative-interpretive research methods. Dr. Stone received their Ph.D. in Political Science from The City University of New York in 2023. Their dissertation received the 2024 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association Caucus for Critical Political Science. Dr. Stone’s research examines the intersection of public policymaking and political culture from a feminist and critical race perspective.

Robin L. Turner is a Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the African and Black Studies Minor at Butler University (USA) and an honorary research associate of the Society, Work, and Politics Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand (RSA). Co-founder of Black Women Writing African Politics and Women of Color in Comparative Politics, Dr. Turner also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program from 2019-2025 and as the founding director of the Social Justice and Diversity Butler University Core Curriculum requirement from 2017 to 2019. She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley and a masters degree in social science (African politics) from the University of Cape Town. Her research, writing, and teaching span multiple fields, including political science, gender studies, African studies, development studies, tourism studies, political ecology, and geography.

Dr. Turner’s research focuses principally on how public policies shape rural political economies, influence identities, and affect people’s behavior in southern Africa. She uses interviews, ethnography, and archival research to examine the interplay between state policies and local practices over time and to look closely at how past and present ways of structuring property and authority shape local political economies and influence constructions of identity. She has published on topics ranging from the politics of tradition; dispossession, property, and nature tourism; and field research to decolonial pedagogy in journals including Africa Spectrum, Development and Change, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Peacebuilding.

Dr. Turner teaches courses that help students better understand the perspectives, experiences, and political strategies of historically marginalized people in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Her courses contribute to the political science major and minor, to the core curriculum, and to several interdisciplinary programs. She led the development of a new Global and Historical Studies course centered on the question, “What is Freedom,” with grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities,

Dr. Mneesha Gellman is Professor of Political Science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Her research spans human rights and democratization in Latin America and globally. She is the author of many books, including Learning to Survive: Yurok Well-being in School, undertaken collaboratively with the Yurok Tribe of California; Misrepresentation and Silence in United States History Textbooks: The Politics of Historical Oblivion; Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States; and Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador. Dr. Gellman has written specifically on collaborative methodology with vulnerable communities in multiple outlets including PS: Political Science and Politics, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and in Doing Good Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press).

The founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which brings a Bachelor’s degree pathway to incarcerated students in Massachusetts, Dr. Gellman is also the editor of Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison, and co-editor of Unlocking Learning: International Perspectives on Education in Prison. Dr. Gellman is past President of the Human Rights section of the APSA, and serves as an expert witness on country conditions in US immigration courts for people from Mexico and El Salvador in asylum and deportation proceedings.

María Méndez is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research examines organized violence with a focus on the illicit and subaltern worlds of Latin America. Her current book project, "Lethal Labor: Making a Living in Gangland Central America," investigates how gang violence operates as a form of labor, shaping gendered identities and generating material resources for socioeconomically excluded people in the region. As part of an SSHRC-funded international team, María is working to document and commemorate the history of the Salvadoran Civil War through her collaboration with embroidery collectives in Chalatenango, El Salvador. Recent publications include: Registering the Gang Body in Pain: Violence and Haunting in Central America in Cultural Studies (2025), Studying Gangs in Central and South America: Reflections on Gender and Researcher Positionality in The Oxford Handbook of Gangs and Society (2024) and Acuerpar: The decolonial feminist call for embodied solidarity in Signs (2023).

Erica Simmons is Professor of Political Science and International Studies and holds the Department of Political Science Booth Fowler Professorship. In 2023 she was awarded a Romnes Faculty Fellowship by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was also recognized by the American Political Science Association with the David Collier Mid-Career Award for her contributions to qualitative methods. Simmons also holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Sociology and is the Faculty Director of the International Studies Major.

Simmons’ research and teaching are motivated by an interest in contentious politics, particularly in Latin America. Simmons received an AB from Harvard College (1999) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2012). Her current work explores the intersection of market reforms and political resistance in the region and her dissertation on the topic was awarded the Latin American Studies Association/Oxfam America 2013 Martin Diskin award. She is the author of Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016) which was awarded the 2017 Charles Tilly award for distinguished contribution to scholarship on collective behavior and social movements. Simmons is currently working on two book projects, one on target response to social mobilization and another on the intersection of resource extraction, redistribution, and indigenous politics in Latin America. Her work on contentious politics has appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and Theory and Society, among others.

Simmons also writes on ethnographic and qualitative methods, co-editing (with Nicholas Rush Smith) Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-authoring articles in Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. She is currently working with Smith on new project on approaches to generalizability. Her qualitative methods work has twice been recognized with the Sage Paper Award for the best paper developing or applying qualitative methods presented at the American Political Association Annual Meeting.

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation, among others.

Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of Lonson. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Previously, Smith was on the faculty of the City University of New York - City College and the Graduate Center.

Smith’s research utilizes qualitative methods to examine how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to challenge that order.

Based on approximately twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, Smith’s first book, Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019), explored these themes through the lens of crime, policing, and vigilantism in South Africa. The book won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, was co-winner of the Best Book Award from the African Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, and was named an Honorable Mention for the Charles Taylor Book Award of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group of the American Political Science Association.

With Erica S. Simmons, Smith has also written about the intersection of comparative and ethnographic methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. For their work, Simmons and Smith were jointly awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association.

Smith’s work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets. He has won fellowship or grant support from Fulbright Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. He has also held visiting researcher or fellowship positions at the Australian National University and the University of KwaZuluNatal and is a regular instructor in the Institute for Qualitative and Multimethod Research at Syracuse University. He was the inaugural recipient of CCNY’s Colin Powell School Faculty Teaching Award.

Currently, Smith is working on three book projects. The first examines the politics of police violence in democratic states, focusing on South Africa. The second explores the practice of “shadow work,” like ethnography and espionage, through a family history. The final project, with Erica S. Simmons, reconsiders the goal of generalization in political research.

Smith received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Devon Cantwell-Chavez (she/her/hers) has a Ph.D in Political Studies from the University of Ottawa. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Her current project is “RIPPLE: The Transformative Impact of High Ambition City Commitments,” which focuses on understanding the catalytic effects and transformative potential of the C40 Water Safe Cities Accelerator program. This project is led by Dr. Michele Betsill at the University of Copenhagen as the PI with C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Grundfos Foundation as partners.

Overall, Devon’s research focuses on urban climate governance norms and the impacts of urban climate governance norms on residents. Her current book project (in preparation) focuses on the emergence of norm leadership and entreprenuers in the areas of green spaces, climate action plans (CAPs), and mobility across four global mega-cities: Ho Chi Minh City, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Seoul. Devon uses a broad range of methods in her research including interviews, ethnography, spatial ethnography/grounded visualization, GIS analysis, archival research, policy document analysis, as well as quantitative analysis.

Prior to her academic career, Devon worked as a K-12 mathematics and computer science instructor for schools in Alabama and Mississippi. She has also worked as an instructional coach and content designer for Teach for America. Additionally, she has practical experience in working for public agencies as a researcher and data analyst.

She was a 2021-2022 Fulbright Research Fellow to Vietnam and was based in Saigon with the Southern Institute for Social Sciences (SISS), studying city climate change mitigation and adaptation in Vietnam. She was also a co-PI on the project “ROK-US Collaboration on Environmental Policy,” funded by the Korea Foundation.

I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska Omaha. I earned my PhD in political science at Northwestern University. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I unite comparative politics and international relations with environmental politics, Middle Eastern studies, and critical geography.

My research investigates the politics of garbage. In my book project, I show how authoritarian states seek to “sanitize” and depoliticize contentious issues like waste at sites of global environmental governance.

Before starting my PhD, I worked as the assistant director for the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) and as an associate editor for the Monkey Cage. I earned an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies from Allegheny College.

As an educator, I bring a holistic approach to teaching politics and guiding students to understand and analyze the complicated world around them. At Northwestern, I taught as instructor of record with Chicago Field Studies and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The Omaha region where I live and work is on the traditional treaty lands of the Omaha and Otoe-Missouria Tribal Nations. The area remains home to more than 170 tribes including the Tribe of Nebraska, the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska. Moving beyond land acknowledgements encompasses not only being aware of Indigenous past, present, and futures on the land but also supporting Native movements for sovereignty and self-determination.

Dr. Sarah E. Parkinson is the Aronson Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines organizational behavior and social change in war- and disaster-affected settings, with a focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa. Parkinson has published award-winning research on militant organizations’ decision-making and internal dynamics, political violence, forced migrants’ access to healthcare, humanitarian aid, ethics, and research methods. Most recently, she has been conducting multi-sited research on disaster preparedness/response and public safety. Dr. Parkinson’s scholarship has involved extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Iraq, and Qatar, as well as shorter engagements in Tunisia, Turkey, and the UAE.

Dr. Parkinson’s book, Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Routledge Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence and received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Book on Middle East and North Africa Politics from the American Political Science Association’s Middle East and North Africa Politics Organized Section. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics in addition to outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Monkey Cage, and Good Authority. She has provided media commentary to outlets such as the Washington Post, BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg News, USA Today, ABC News, and Vox, among others.

Dr. Parkinson is a co-founder of the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium and sits on the advisory board of the Project on Middle East Political Science. She received her PhD and MA in political science from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at Yale University, George Washington University, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern University in Qatar. Parkinson speaks Arabic and French and is an active first responder in her free time.

Aarie Glas, Ph.D. (University of Toronto), is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science specializing in international relations (IR) and a faculty associate in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS). His research interests include regional governance and conflict management in the Global South, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), international relations theory, and interpretive and qualitative research methods. Prof. Glas is an executive committee member of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.

Dara Strolovitch is Professor of women’s gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and political science at Yale, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, which examined how social and economic justice organizations advocate on behalf of intersectionally-marginalized groups. Affirmative Advocacy received the APSA’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, the Leon Epstein Award for the best book on political organizations and parties, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and ARNOVA’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize.

Strolovitch’s second book, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America, won the 2024 award for the best book on race, ethnicity, and politics from APSA’s Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section and a Choice Award for outstanding academic title. The book examines the relationship between episodic hard times and the kinds of quotidian hard times that structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups by unpacking the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis, in part by exploring the raced and gendered politics of credit, subprime lending, and housing foreclosures.

Her work also appears in several edited volumes and journals and has been supported by sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brookings Institution, and the World Health Organization. She received the 2018 Outstanding Career Award from the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus and is co-recipient of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science’s Mansbridge Award, given “to extraordinary individuals who perform service above and beyond the call of duty…to advance opportunities for women.” She was founding associate editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and served as co-editor of the American Political Science Review (2020-2024). With Allison Harris, she serves as co-director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social & Policy Studies.

Kevin Olson is a political theorist who writes on issues of colonialism and postcoloniality, insurgent and popular politics, cultural politics, poststructuralism, and critical theory. He has methodological interests in genealogy, visual culture, and archival research. Olson is the author of Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy (Columbia), Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge), Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (MIT), and editor of Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (Verso). He is also co-editor of the journal Political Theory. He has held residential fellowships as an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Château de la Bretesche, France, an Erasmus Mundus Scholar at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Germany.

Olson’s most recent book, Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy, received the 2025 Charles Taylor Book Award. It focuses on the politics of subordination and resistance, examining the complex ways that subaltern subjects have been silenced, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and some of the subtle and unexpected forms of resistance they have mounted in return. This work explores rich archives of treatises, pamphlets, broadsheets, correspondence, administrative documents, court records, illustrations, caricatures, and photographs from the revolutionary Caribbean and colonial Europe. It draws insights from Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, Ernesto Laclau, and others, and ranges over themes of collective imagination, affect, performativity, the construction of public spheres, and the dynamics of subaltern speech.

I have been teaching at Villanova University located on the outskirts of Philadelphia. I offer courses on populism, globalization, democratization, as well as a wide range of methods courses. I enjoy fostering students' curiosity, developing their research skills, and showing them how their training serves them to better understand the ever more complex world they face. In short, I try to keep the gifts of a liberal arts education alive and contribute to Villanova's commitment offering a holistic education. I also regularly offer graduate modules on comparative historical analysis (CHA) at the IQMR, ECPR, and MethodsNet methods schools.

My research is motivated by intersecting methodological and substantive interests. Methodologically, I am working process tracing, description, theorizing and above all comparative historical analysis. I am particularly interested in how our conceptualization of time and history shapes our theoretical and methodological choices. Substantively, I have worked on the historical origins of electoral systems, parliamentarism, and party systems in Western and Eastern Europe. More recently, I have become interested in how economic inequalities generated by free market economies and political equalities promised by democracy have contribute to repeated populist surges since the late 19th century.

Professor Ahmed's main area of specialization is democratic studies, with a special interest in elections, voting systems, legislative politics, party development, and voting rights. She examines these issues in historical and comparative perspective and her work combines a regional focus on Europe and the United States. She is author of Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Best Book Award from the APSA European Politics and Society Section and the 2025 George H. Hallett Award from the APSA Representation and Electoral Systems Section. Her new book, The Regime Question: Foundations of Democratic Governance in Europe and The United States (Princeton University Press, 2025) examines the history of regime contention in western democracies with a view to understanding the enduring dynamics and long-term impact of fights over the "rules of the game”. She is currently working on a new book entitled "Democracies in America: Understanding Conflict Democratic Attitudes," which seeks to understand regime contention in the U.S. today through ground-up investigation of public conceptions of democracy. She also has a special interest in research methods and has written about mixed-method research designs, the position of historical analysis within the social sciences, and comparative areas studies. Her work has appeared in various journals including: Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of Politics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of Comparative Politics, West European Politics, American Political Development, Democracy and Autocracy, Electoral Studies, and Research Methods.

Biko is an Associate Professor of Government & Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College and co-founder of Research|Action, a worker owned research and organizing firm. They are working on an ethnographic book project that follows the 2020 Trump reelection campaign from his perspective as a volunteer, and is the author of Worker Centered (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Deva Woodly is a Professor at Brown University. She is the author of Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford 2021) and The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015). She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research covers a variety of topics, from media and communication to political understandings of economics, to race and imagination, and social movements. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political meanings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Her work centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Guillermo Caballero is a faculty affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College, as well as a critical scholar, educator, and Boston-based spoken word artist.

His areas of specialization encompass American politics, focusing on Black political representation, public policy, and identity politics, particularly social movements. His unique approach involves examining the relationship between power and resistance by centering the lived experiences of Black women lawmakers in the legislature within the interpretive paradigm. This approach allows him to delve into the concepts of power, resistance, institutions, and informal norms in the legislative context.

As an educator, he believes in assisting students in developing their critical frameworks, allowing them to interpret the political world. He helps students build their critical frameworks through concepts of social construction and critical reflexivity.

Samantha Majic holds a PhD in Government from Cornell University, and is Professor of Political Science at John Jay College-CUNY. She is also a member of the doctoral faculty in both the Political Science and Criminal Justice PhD programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a co-director of the American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research. Her research lies in gender and American politics, with specific interests in sex work, celebrity and politics, and fat and fitness studies. She is the author of Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision (University of Pennsylvania Press), co-author (with Carisa Showden) of Youth Who Trade Sex in the US: Agency, Intersectionality, and Vulnerability (Temple University Press), and the co-editor (with Carisa Showden) of Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism (University of Minnesota Press). Her most recent book, Lights, Camera, Feminism? Celebrities and Anti-Trafficking Politics, came out with the University of California Press in May 2023. Her research has also appeared in numerous political science and gender studies journals. A Fellow of the American Association of University Women, and a Woodhull Freedom Foundation grantee, Dr. Majic is also a member of the editorial boards for Perspectives on Politics, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and Critical Policy Studies.

Dr. Carolyn E. Holmes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on nationalism and post-conflict transitions to democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2015. She has conducted extensive field research in South Africa, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program. She has also conducted preliminary work in Ghana, while teaching graduate students in Accra.

Dr. Holmes teaches classes on African Politics, Politics of the Developing World, Comparative Politics, Qualitative Methods, and Nationalism.

Her research has appeared in African Affairs, Acta Politica, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Democratization, and the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Ramón Garibaldo Valdéz studies social movements, U.S. Latinx politics, and immigration. His current book project is entitled, “La lucha de cada día: Immigrant Justice Organizing and the Political Remaking of Illegality in the U.S.” Based on three years of ethnographic research, it centers immigrant justice organizations, led by and representing undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, as key actors in American democracy. It chronicles and analyzes immigrant-led community organizing, exploring the strategies employed by these communities to advance welcoming social policies, create long-lasting political infrastructures, and even organize inside detention centers.

Ramón earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil degrees from Yale University’s Political Science Department, and a B.A. in political science from Johnson C. Smith University, a Historically Black College in North Carolina. Ramón is a passionate advocate of activist research, ethnographic methods, and grounded theorizing in the study of politics.

Natasha Behl is associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. Dr. Behl completed her doctorate in political science at University of California, Los Angeles, where her training focused on race, ethnicity, politics and comparative politics.

Dr. Behl explains why the promise of democratic equality remains unrealized, and identifies potential ways to create more egalitarian relations in liberal democracies and the discipline of political science. This intellectual endeavor has demanded that she cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge epistemological and methodological norms in political science to understand the gendered and raced nature of politics as a practice and political science as a discipline. She uses interpretive methods to examine what are often assumed to be neutral concepts, objective methodologies, and universal institutions, and demonstrate that these very concepts, methodologies, and institutions are gendered and raced such that they determine who enjoys democratic inclusion, who commands academic authority, and who is most vulnerable to violence.

Dr. Behl’s book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, is published with Oxford University Press. The book received the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence. Her research is published in leading journals like American Political Science Review, PS: Political Science and Politics, Feminist Formations, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. She was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award and Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards at ASU. She was also awarded ASU’s Leadership Excellence Award and Social Impact Award.

As a thought leader in social movements and democracy, Dr. Behl has written for The Washington Post and Economic & Political Weekly, commented on the BBC and Public Radio International, and given a TEDx Talk.

Dr. Behl applies her insights as Director of the M.A. Program in Social Justice & Human Rights.

Jennifer Cyr is associate professor of Political Science, and Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science, at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina. She thinks about and writes on democracy, democratic resilience, political representation, collaborative governance, and qualitative methods. She has published multiple books, including The Fates of Political Parties: Institutional Crisis, Continuity, and Change in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Focus Groups for the Social Science Researcher (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Doing Good Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press, 2024, co-edited with Sara Goodman), and ¿Cómo gobernar en América Latina? (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2025, co-edited with Matías Bianchi, et al).

Her work is also found in a wide variety of academic journals. She has also published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, PS: Political Science and Politics, Quality & Quantity, Studies in Comparative International Development, Sociological Methods and Research, and Revista de Ciencia Política, and has several chapters in edited volumes.

She received her PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, has an MA in Political Science from Northwestern University, and an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University.

Andy Scerri is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He has published two books and over 30 peer-reviewed articles, and has been awarded numerous fellowships, notably by the Fulbright US Scholars Program. He works in political and social theory on the problem of legitimacy.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College. Previously I was a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the DPIR, in association with St Hilda's College. Before that, I was a Max Weber Fellow and Part-Time (Assistant) Professor of Qualitative Methods in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the European University Institute. I earned my DPhil and MSc at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and BSc at Cornell University. My doctoral thesis was awarded the Michael Nicholson Prize for the best dissertation in International Studies from the British International Studies Association and the Elizabeth Wiskemann Prize for best dissertation on (in)equality & social justice from the Political Studies Association.

I have held visiting research fellowships at the Hertie School (Centre for International Security) in Berlin, and at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and have worked for the United Nations, in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General and the Office of the Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, as well as for human rights organisations in Washington DC and Buenos Aires.

Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a Professor of Government, Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown's research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women's studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity.

She is the author or editor of several award winning books – including Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford University Press); Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (with Danielle Lemi); Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (with Sarah Allen Gershon, Routledge Press); The Politics of Protest: Readings on the Black Lives Matter Movement (with Ray Block, Jr. and Christopher Stout, Routledge Press); Approaching Democracy: American Government in Times of Challenge (with Larry Berman, Bruce Allen Murphy and Sarah Allen Gershon, Routledge Press). Professor Brown is the lead editor of Politics, Groups and Identities. Professor Brown is part of the #MeTooPoliSci Collective where she spearheads efforts to stop sexual harassment in the discipline. Along with co-PIs Rebecca Gill (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Stella Rouse (University of Maryland, College Park), Elizabeth Sharrow (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) she is the recipient of a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for their project titled "#MeTooPoliSci Leveraging A Professional Association to Address Sexual Harassment in Political Science." Lastly, Professor Brown is an editor with Good Authority, a political science blog.

Denise Walsh is a Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. She conducts cross-regional comparative analyses to investigate how liberal democracies can become more inclusive and just. ​She is currently working on a book titled Misogyny in Power: Unmaking Democracy, Remaking Capitalism. Her most recent book, Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women’s Rights Don’t Clash (Oxford University Press, October 2025), won the 2026 ISA's Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Research Section Best Book Prize. It compares policy debates about the face veil ban in France, polygyny in South Africa, and Indigenous women’s Indian status in Canada. She argues that a clash between culture and women's rights is never inescapable, discusses what fuels the widely held perception that the two clash, and explains how justice can be advanced for minoritized women and their communities. Walsh's first book, Women’s Rights in Democratizing States (Cambridge University Press, 2010), compares South Africa, Poland, and Chile to argue that when debate is more open and inclusive in institutions such as unions and political parties, women’s rights advance. Walsh is a former editor of the American Political Science Review and has been active in diversifying the profession. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Notre Dame, the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Italy, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and many organizations at the University of Virginia.

Michelle Weitzel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Prior to joining the Institute, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Basel (2020-2022). She received her PhD from The New School in 2020, where she trained in comparative politics and international relations and specialized in the political systems of the Middle East and North Africa. Weitzel’s research centers on repression, violence, conflict, critical security studies, spatial and sensory politics, affect and emotions. Her current book project, entitled “Sound Politics: Affective Governance and the State,” draws on case studies in Palestine, Israel, Algeria, France, and Morocco.

Lauren M. MacLean is the Thomas P. O’Neill Chair of Public Life and Department Chair of Political Science at Northeastern University. She teaches POLS 1000, the Senior Capstone class, Politics of Developing Nations, Mixed Methods, and African Politics. She also does research on the politics of electricity access and the everyday practice of citizenship in Africa. She conducts fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya, collecting survey data from individuals, conducting focus group discussions, doing archival work, and carrying out qualitative interviews with politicians, policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary people.

MacLean has published award-winning books and articles including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa (Cambridge, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell, 2014), co-edited with Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge, 2015), coauthored with Kapiszewski and Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including NSF, SSRC, RWJ, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.

Kimala Price is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Co-Director of the Bread and Roses Center for Feminist Research and Activism at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on reproductive health policy and politics, women of color and the reproductive justice movement, queering reproductive justice, coalition-building and political intersectionality, anti-abortion campaigns targeting African American communities, interpretive research methods and methodology (esp. discourse, narrative, and visual analysis), and community-engaged research. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Reclaiming the Black Reproductive Body, that examines how African American communities have organized for reproductive justice in the U.S. She is the author of Reproductive Politics in the United States (Routledge 2021). Her research has also been published in journals such as Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Women’s Health Issues; American Studies; Sexuality Research and Social Policy; and Contexts, and in edited volumes such as Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminist Anthology and LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader. She has also written commentary for the Washington Post and the Conversation. She served on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest (serving San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial Counties) for many years. She has a PhD in political science and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dr. Hintz’s research examines how contestation over various identities - e.g., national, ethnic, gender, anti-imperial/civilizational - shapes politics from international to subnational and societal levels. Trained as political scientist, she draws tools from anthropology and media studies to study identity dynamics with contextual nuance and analytical rigor. Her regional focus on Turkey and its varied neighborhoods provides numerous cases for comparative analysis - e.g., Kurdish and Alevi issues, political Islam, anti-Westernism/civilizationalism - that also spill over to impact transnational mobilization, foreign policy, and grand strategy-making.

Her recent publications and current projects aim at audio-visualizing the political science toolkit. These include a multiple-award-winning article on cooking shows as "gender edutainment" in Politics & Gender, an award-winning article in Perspectives on Politics on authoritarians' use of historical heroes and enemies in legitimation strategies that built a dataset on +11,000 YouTube videos, and research on populists' hyper-mediatization of Others in foreign policy and grand strategy (article in Foreign Policy, monograph project under contract with Oxford University Press).

In this media vein, Dr. Hintz is deeply committed to getting political scientists to take cultural content as seriously as regime and opposition actors do. She has an article on rap videos, memes, and graffiti as creative resistance tools in British Journal of Middle East Studies, and a monograph under contract with Cambridge University Press on popular culture as political battleground in autocratizing regimes. She is chairing an APSA 2026 pre-conference short course called "Studying Cool Stuff Seriously."

Her work on identity politics also includes her 2018 OUP book, Identity Politics Inside Out, as well as publications in Security Studies (constraints of nationalist constituencies on defense purchases), Democratization (ethnic prejudice in local-level authoritarianism), Nationalities Papers (holidays as sites of minority identity contestation), PS: Political Science and Politics (blueprint for post-disaster academic solidarity, and Survival (rethinking Turkey's "rapprochements" with Europe and Israel). She frequently contributes to public square outlets such as Foreign Policy, Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Boston Globe, War on the Rocks, BBC World News.

For 166 weeks and counting, she has run a writing solidarity Zoom group for scholars from/working on the MENA region.