Faculty Bios

Christopher Carter is assistant professor in the Department of Politics and John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is also a research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his book project, he examines the emergence as well as the political and social effects of Indigenous autonomy in Latin America.  All of his work employs a multi-method approach, using experimental and natural experimental data as well as extensive interviewing and archival research.

Tasha Fairfield is an associate professor at the London School of Economics, and holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, "Private Wealth and Public Revenue in Latin America: Business Power and Tax Politics" (CUP 2015), won the Latin American Studies Association’s Donna Lee Van Cott Award.

Her methodological works (with A.E. Charman) include “Explicit Bayesian Analysis for Process Tracing” (Political Analysis 2017), which won the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi Method Research Sage Best Paper Award, and "Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference" (CUP 2022), which was initiated during a 2017-18 Mellon Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. 

Her current research examines the debate on SARS-CoV-2 origins from a Bayesian perspective, evaluating how strongly available evidence weighs in favor of zoonosis vs. lab-leak scenarios.

Laura García-Montoya is an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie in comparative politics, public policy, and research methodologies, with a focus on the political economy of inequalities in Latin America and its relationship with development and violence.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, PNAS, Sociological Methods and Research, The Journal of Politics in Latin America, Revista de Ciencia Política, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of Comparative Politics.

She is currently writing a book titled Escaping Inequality Traps: State Formation, Elites, and the Myth of Progress, which examines the causes of economic inequality traps—persistent and high levels of economic inequality—in Latin America and explores why and how some countries manage to break free and pursue paths of diminishing inequality.

Gary Goertz is an independent scholar working from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the author of numerous methodological articles and books, including "A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences," "Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms, and Case Studies: An Integrated Approach," "Social Science Concepts and Measurement}: new and completely revised edition, 2020" (all with Princeton University Press).

Alan M. Jacobs is a professor of political science and head of department 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" (Cambridge University Press, 2011), recipient of APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics and APSA’s Giovanni Sartori Award for 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. His forthcoming book with Macartan Humphreys, Integrated Inferences: Causal Models for Qualitative and Mixed-Method Research, examines how process tracing, large-N analysis, and multi-method causal inference can be grounded in causal models.

Jacobs is currently president of APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (QMMR) 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.

Diana Kapiszewski is the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Government and director of the Center for Latin American Studies 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 a co-edited volume on concepts, data, and methods in comparative law and politics, and projects examining 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, www.sigladata.org) and co-edits the Cambridge University Press “Methods for Social Inquiry” book series.

Marcus Kreuzer is a professor of political science at Villanova University. His work focuses 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: A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis" (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

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 looks 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, 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.

Lauren MacLean is a professor of political science at Northeastern 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.

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 University Press, 2003), “Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity” (Duke University Press, 2013), “The Mana of Mass Society” (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, “Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment” (The University of Chicago Press, 2020).

He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of “Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction” (Indiana University Press, 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.

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 served as 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).

Robert Mickey is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. He writes and teaches on American politics, often in a cross-national perspective.

He has received multiple teaching accolades, including the department’s Tronstein Prize for outstanding undergraduate teaching (2019), recognition as an Honored Instructor by the Office of Living Learning Programs (2018), and nominations for the University’s Golden Apple Award for best lecturer (2017, 2021).

He was the department’s graduation speaker in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and currently serves as the placement director for the department’s Ph.D. students. Formerly the department’s Diversity Ally, he co-founded the Eldersveld Emerging Scholars Conference in 2011 with Nick Valentino and Elizabeth Wingrove and continues to play a key role in its organization.

As director of graduate studies, he initiated research and student-support collaborations with the departments of political science at Jackson State University and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. Alongside Vince Hutchings and D’Andra Orey (Jackson State), he is developing a research project on perceptions of police and policing in the United States.

He also serves as a faculty mentor in the Rackham Graduate School’s Aspiring Fellows Program and its Summer Research Opportunity Program and, since 2016, has taught Summer Bridge Scholars through Michigan’s Comprehensive Studies Program.

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 health care, humanitarian aid, ethics and research methods.

Most recently, she has been conducting multi-sited research on disaster preparedness/response and public safety. Parkinson’s scholarship has involved extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Iraq and Qatar, as well as shorter engagements in Tunisia, Turkey and the UAE.

Tesalia Rizzo Reyes is an assistant professor of  political science at the University of California, Merced. Reyes is also a research affiliate at the MIT Governance Lab and at the Stanford Governance Project. Additionally, Reyes is affiliated with CAPE and co-directs the PEARS Lab at UC Merced.

Jonell Robinson is an associate professor of geography and the environment at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Her research interests are community geography and participatory geographic information systems (GIS). 

Nicholas Rush Smith is an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York – City College and a 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.

Jaye Seawright is a professor of political science at Northwestern University. 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.

Seawright is the author of “Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela” (Stanford University Press, 2012). Seawright’s research has been published in Political Analysis, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and a range of other journals and edited volumes.

Hillel David Soifer is an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Temple University. He holds a B.A. in the growth and structure of cities from Haverford College, an M.A. in Latin American studies from Georgetown University, and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard.

His first book “State Building in Latin America” was published by Cambridge University Press. He has also published a wide range of articles on Latin American politics, issues in research design and methodology, and conceptual and empirical questions about state capacity and state development.

He received the QMMR section's David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award in 2022. He is currently finishing a book on some of the inferential issues entailed in the study of spatial aggregate units.

Guadalupe Tuñón is an assistant professor in Princeton's Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs. He studies comparative politics and political economy with a regional focus on Latin America.

Tuñón’s first book project investigates how religious ideas about economics and inequality shape the electoral and policy influence of religious actors.

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 the Department of Anthropology.

Her publications include three books: “Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria” (Yhe University of Chicago Press, 1999; with a new preface, 2015); “Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen” (The University of Chicago Press, 2008); and “Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria” (The University of Chicago Press, 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.

Her book “Authoritarian Apprehensions” 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 section of the “Oxford University Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science” (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.).

Wedeen is making plans for another ethnography in the Middle East.