Andrew Bennett is Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He teaches courses on the American foreign policy process, international relations theory, and qualitative research methods. He has been a fellow at arms control and international relations research centers at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and he has written on the U.S. foreign policy process, research methods, alliance burden‐sharing, and regional conflicts and peacekeeping. Professor Bennett is the author of Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet‐Russian Military Interventionism 1973‐1996 (MIT Press, 1999). He is, with Alexander George, the co‐author of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). From 1994‐1995, as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, he was Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Joseph S. Nye Jr. His op‐eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and he has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and Fox News.
Christopher Carter is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. In Fall 2022, he will join the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor. In his book project, Carter examines the emergence as well as the political and social effects of indigenous rights in the Americas. All Carter’s work employs a multi-method approach, using experimental and natural experimental data as well as extensive interviewing and archival research. Carter received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020.
Zenobia Chan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). She studies the international and domestic politics of economic statecraft. Her dissertation book project investigates how economic inducements, such as foreign aid, loans, investment, and sales of natural resources, work in influencing the preferences and behavior of elites and the public abroad. Prior to her doctoral studies, Zenobia was an analyst and geo-data engineer at Google, and consulted for the United Nations, OECD, and World Bank. She holds master's degrees from Princeton University, Columbia University, and Sciences Po Paris, and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Hong Kong
Jennifer Cyr is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her substantive research agenda examines representation, identity, and democracy in Latin America. Her methodological interests center on the rigorous integration of qualitative methods, and especially focus groups, into mixed-methods research. She has published two books with Cambridge University Press, The Fates of Political Parties: Institutional Crisis, Continuity, and Change in Latin America (2017), and Focus Groups for the Social Science Researcher (2019). She has also published in a wide variety of journals, including Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Quality & Quantity, Studies in Comparative International Development, Sociological Methods and Research, and Revista de Ciencia Política. Cyr is co-founder of the Southwest Workshop on Mixed Methods Research (SWMMR). She received her PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University.
Tasha Fairfield is Associate Professor in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, along with an M.A. in Latin American Studies and an M.S. in physics from Stanford University. Her first book, Private Wealth and Public Revenue in Latin America: Business Power and Tax Politics (CUP 2015), won the Donna Lee Van Cott Award. Her methodology articles include “Explicit Bayesian Analysis for Process Tracing” (Political Analysis 2017, with A.E. Charman), which won the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi Method Research Sage Best Paper Award. She was a 2017-18 Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her book (with A.E. Charman), Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Gary Goertz is professor of Political Science at the Kroc Center for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He is the author or editor of nine books and over 50 articles and chapters on topics of international institutions, methodology, and conflict studies. His methodological research focuses on concepts and measurement along with set theoretic approaches, including "Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals," (2007), "Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology" (2008), "A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences" (2012), and "Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms, and Case Studies: The Research Triad" (2017). The completely revised and rewritten edition of his (2005) concept book "Social science concepts and measurement'' was published by Princeton in 2020.
Daragh Grant is a Senior Lecturer in the College and Co-Chair of the Classics of Social and Political Thought core sequence at the University of Chicago. His intellectual interests include the history of colonialism and empire, the history of slavery, and the development of understandings of sovereignty and subjecthood from the sixteenth century to the present. He is currently preparing his book manuscript for publication, which is tentatively titled "Experiments in Order: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and State Formation in Early New England." This manuscript brings together his interests in colonialism and state formation to explain how English settlers in the New England colonies asserted and defended their claims to jurisdiction over lands and peoples in the Americas. It also explores the strategies by which indigenous polities and some settler communities sought to resist or exploit colonial governments and the imperial center to their own ends. Daragh’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The William and Mary Quarterly, and Renaissance Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The Journal of Modern History.
Alan M. Jacobs is a Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia specializing in comparative political economy and public policy, political behavior, and methodology. He is the author of Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (2011), recipient of the APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics and the APSA’s Giovanni Sartori Award for the Best Book Developing or Applying Qualitative Methods. His research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and other venues. With Macartan Humphreys, he is currently completing a book, Integrated Inferences, that examines how process tracing and mixed-method causal inference can be grounded in causal models. Jacobs is currently President of the APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section and has previously served as co-editor of the section’s publication and co-chair of the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations. In 2017, he was co-recipient of the QMMR section’s David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.
Sarah Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie in the history of social and political thought, particularly since the eighteenth century. She is currently working on two projects that explore the relationship between social and political thought and the historical imagination. One is a book manuscript (“The Ages We Live By”) that examines how practices of historical periodization shape efforts to analyze and reimagine social and political life. The other is a new project on the coevolution of Karl Marx’s ideas about history, critique, and political economy. Alongside these projects, she is preparing a short essay on the philosophy of history for the Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought. Her work has appeared in Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Diana Kapiszewski is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her research interests include public law, comparative politics, and research methods. She has published several books (authored and co-edited) and multiple articles on comparative law and courts, as well as on field research and research transparency. Her ongoing work includes projects examining "constitutionalism with adjectives", institutions of electoral governance in Latin America, and how research methods are used in political science scholarship. Kapiszewski directs SIGLA (the States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America database project) and co-edits the Cambridge University Press “Methods for Social Inquiry” book series.
Diana Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant. Diana’s book, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia was published with Princeton University Press in 2020. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and held a Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. In addition to teaching comparative politics, public policy, and transnational histories of colonialism and empire in Southeast and East Asia, Diana co-curates the Invisible Histories project, a digital platform for researchers to share photographs in context and explore the hidden narratives behind them.
Marcus Kreuzer is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He has been working on the origins of European and post-communist party systems as well as qualitative methodology. He is the author of Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy – France and Germany 1870-1939 (Michigan 2001) and The Grammar of Time. Leveraging the Methodological Riches of History through Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, forthcoming). He is interested in the conundrum of how to study a disorderly and continuously changing world in the most orderly fashion possible and with methodologies mindful of temporal dynamics. To disentangle this conundrum, he looked to how comparative historical analysis employs a nuanced temporal vocabulary, uses distinct notions of causality, and draws on a more heterodox understanding of methodology than standard variance-based analysis. His articles have dealt with path dependency, conceptions of time, historical exceptionalism, conceptualizations of historical change, and proper use of historical evidence, and the nature of historical description. They have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Central European History, and Perspectives on Politics.
Will Lowe is Senior Research Scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. Lowe is a political methodologist interested in statistical text analysis and causal inference. Before the Hertie School, Lowe was a Senior Research Specialist and Lecturer at Princeton's Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs and has previously held positions at the Mannheim Centre for Social Research (MZES), Maastricht University, Trinity College, Dublin and Harvard University. He has published on methodology in the American Political Science Review, International Organization and Political Analysis, legislative politics in Legislative Studies Quarterly and Electoral Studies, on international politics in China Quarterly and the Journal of Peace Research, on public policy in European Union Politics, Nature Human Behavior, and on social media in Information, Communication & Society.
Lauren MacLean is the Arthur F. Bentley Chair and Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the political economy of state formation, public service provision, and democratic citizenship in Africa. MacLean has published award-winning books including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa: Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2014), co-edited with Melani Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015), coauthored with Diana Kapiszewski and Ben Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including from NSF, SSRC, RWJ, and Fulbright-Hays. As a Carnegie Fellow (2017-19), she started a new book project focused on the politics of the electricity crisis and the exercise of democratic citizenship in Ghana. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.
James Mahoney is Gordon Fulcher Professor of Decision-Making and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is a comparative‐historical researcher with interests in national development, political regimes, and methodology. He is the author of the prize‐winning books, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). His other books include Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (coedited with Dietrich Rueschemeyer; Cambridge University Press, 2003), Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (coedited with Kathleen Thelen; Cambridge University Press, 2010), and A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Science (with Gary Goertz; Princeton University Press, 2012). Mahoney has been President or Chair of four different Organized Sections of American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. He has been Chair of Sociology at Northwestern, and he is currently on the APSA Council. His most recent book is The Logic of Social Science (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Writing Postcolonial History (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). She is co-editor with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: OUP, 2007) and with Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim, Civilizing Emotions (New York: OUP, 2015).
William Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, ritual and performance, and the occult shadow of the modern. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke, 2013), The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017), and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (Chicago, 2020). He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana, 2009), and the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). His article 'The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement' appears in the 2019 issue of Annual Review of Anthropology. For a sampling of Dr Mazzarella’s publications, please visit his academia.edu profile.
Lily Medina is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her broad interests include political violence, criminal governance, experimental methods and causal inference. Prior to attending U.C. Berkeley, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) within the Institutions and Political Inequality unit. Her work includes evaluating community-driven development initiatives and their effect on citizen attitudes toward authority as well as R-packages for Bayesian methods for causal inference (CausalQueries) and for experimental designs (DesignLibrary). Lily holds an M.S. in statistics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.S. in industrial engineering from University of Los Andes of Bogota.
Ioana-Elena Oană is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She is the main developer of the R package SetMethods for QCA and has extensive experience in teaching QCA using R at various international methods schools and universities (IQMR, ECPR, IPSA-Flacso, Lund University, University of Helsinki, EUI, etc.). She has co-authored with Carsten Q. Schneider and Eva Thomann the book ‘Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) using R: A Beginner’s Guide’ published at Cambridge University Press, 2021. Besides research methodology, Nena's substantive interests revolve around comparative politics and political behavior. Her current work within the SOLID project hosted at the EUI focuses on collective mobilization, public opinion, and party competition dynamics for the study of the multiple crises that have hit the EU since 2008.
Timothy Pachirat graduated from IQMR in the early aughts and has been teaching ethnography at IQMR since 2009. Timothy is author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (Routledge, 2018), and various essays on interpretive methodologies and ethnographic methods in the social sciences. Timothy works as Professor of Critical Political Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Tesalia Rizzo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced. Rizzo is also a Research Affiliate at MIT Governance Lab and at the Stanford Governance Project. Rizzo studies topics in comparative political behavior and political economy using a variety of techniques such as field experiments, surveys, interviews, and observational data. Her book project, titled “Intermediaries of the State: The Bureaucratic Transaction Costs of Claiming Welfare in Mexico,” explores how bureaucratic transaction costs prevent individuals from directly claiming welfare benefits. Instead, these costs create a market for clientelist intermediaries, disincentivizes governments from creating sound social policy, and inhibits citizens from effectively engaging with the state. The policy instrument Rizzo developed through her research was awarded the 2017 Innovations in Transparency award by the Mexican Government’s Transparency Institute. Rizzo’s dissertation received honorable mention in the 2020 Best Dissertation Award in Experimental Research from the American Political Science Association. Rizzo received her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT and she has been a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a postdoctoral fellow at Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
Jonnell Robinson is an Associate Professor of Geography and the Director of the Syracuse Community Geography Program at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests include community-based and participatory action research, and specifically Participatory GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Robinson collaborates with grassroots and community-based organizations to use geographic inquiry to better understand and address social and economic disparities. Robinson is also interested in how and why community-based organizations use geospatial technologies, as well as the limitations to these approaches, in advancing grassroots action research agendas. She teaches courses in community geography, geographic field methods, participatory research, and GIS. She received a Ph.D. in Geography (2010) and a Master of Public Health (2003) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Fred Schaffer is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His area of specialization is comparative politics with a geographic focus on Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Substantively, he studies the meaning and practice of democracy across cultures using the tools of ordinary language philosophy and other language-based interpretive methods. He is author of Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide (2016), The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform (2008), and Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (1998). He also edited Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying (2007).
Jason Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Professor Seawright's research interests include comparative politics, with an emphasis on comparative political parties and on political behavior; and methodology, particularly involving multi-method research designs and issues of causal inference. He is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela. His research has been published in Political Analysis, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and a range of other journals and edited volumes.
Erica Simmons is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and holds the Political Science Department Board of Visitors Professorship. Her research and teaching are motivated by an interest in contentious politics, particularly in Latin America, and qualitative methods. She is the author of Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2016), which was recognized by the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association with the 2017 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. She is also the co-editor of a recent book on qualitative comparisons titled: Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press 2021). Her research has been published in a range of journals, including World Politics, Theory and Society, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Comparative Political Studies and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation, among others. Currently Simmons is pursuing research projects on interactions among protesters and targets, the politics of natural resource extraction, and approaches to generalization in political science.
Nicholas Rush Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His primary research interests are on democratic politics as seen through the lens of crime and policing in post-apartheid South Africa and on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, with Erica Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Research (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and Violence: An International Journal.
David Waldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on research design, qualitative methodology, and comparative politics. His research interests are the political and economic development of the post-colonial world and qualitative causal inference. He is the author of State Building and Late Development, Rethinking the Resource Curse, and multiple articles and chapters on qualitative inference. His current book projects are Qualitative Causal Inference & Explanation and American Nation-Building from the American South to Afghanistan: Militarized Democracy Promotion by an Imperfect Democracy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020), sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group; the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award, given annually for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). She is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (Duke University Press); a coedited Oxford University Handbook with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press); and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.). Wedeen is making plans for another ethnography in the Middle East.
Steven Lloyd Wilson is assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University, project manager for the Varieties of Democracy Institute, and co-PI of the Digital Society Project. His research focuses on comparative democratization, cyber-security, and the effect of the Internet and social media on authoritarian regimes, particularly in the post-Soviet world.