RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Our faculty engage in problem driven research that engages the key public policy issues of the day.
Their work is published by top-ranked university presses—including Oxford, Cornell, Chicago and Cambridge—and in top-ranked political science journals—including Comparative Politics, American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics. Our research keeps us intellectually in shape and assures that there are few questions from our students that we cannot thoughtfully answer.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHTS
Deborah Seligsohn, PhD, teaches courses on China, the environment and comparative political economy. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, she has been writing about her experience working for the US Embassy in Beijing during and after the SARS outbreak. Her article “The U.S.-China collaboration on health collapsed under Trump. This is the cost” was recently published in The Washington Post. Dr. Seligsohn was also quoted in The Atlantic article “Trump’s Break With China Has Deadly Consequences.” In both articles, Dr. Seligsohn stresses the importance of collaboration between the US and China on infectious diseases.
Mark Schrad, PhD, teaches courses on Russian politics, international law and international organizations. He has written several books on prohibition and the overlooked but surprisingly important role that alcohol has played in Russian state-building and politics. Dr. Schrad is an active and regular contributor to public debates about Russian politics, and Russia’s role in the world. He wrote a piece in the New York Times on the centennial anniversary of Prohibition in the United States, or, his favorite topic, the role vodka has played and continues to play in Russian politics, as he writes about in his book Vodka Politics. He also wrote a piece about COVID-19 that was included in a "big thinker" forum at Politico.
Marcus Kreuzer, PhD, teaches courses on methodology and European politics. He is completing a book entitled “The Grammar of Time: How to Use Comparative Historical Analysis to Analyze Political Change.” The book addresses the limited temporal literacy in the social sciences and the limitations it imposes on the systematic analysis of big macro-historical phenomena like the COVID-19 crisis, the collapse of communism, 9/11 or other crucial historical junctures that regularly transform politics in fundamental and lasting ways. He regularly teaches comparative historical analysis at various graduate-level methods schools in the US and Europe.
Camille Burge, PhD, works on public opinion, the politics of emotions, and racial and ethnic politics in the United States. She was recently appointed to a special task force of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The task force—comprising 19 academic experts, pollsters, and statisticians—is evaluating the accuracy of 2020 pre-election polling for the general election on the presidential race and other races. Where it is needed and possible, the AAPOR task force will examine why specific polls or methodologies failed to estimate support for the major party candidates correctly, whether at the national level or state level.
Dr. Burge also regularly works and co-authors articles with students. One of her recent articles, Family matters? Exploring media coverage of presidential candidates’ families by gender and race,” was co-authored with a graduate student and a colleague at George Washington University. Her forthcoming Journal of Politics article, “A Certain Type of Descriptive Representative? How Skin Tone and Gender Influences Black Politics,” was also co-authored with two graduate students.