IQMR 2025 Faculty

Amel Ahmed is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her 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) andThe Regime Question: Foundations of Democratic Governance in European and the United States ( Princeton University Press). 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.

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 is, with Alexander George, the co‐author of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005), and, with Jeffrey Checkel, co-editor of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool; (Cambridge, 2015).

Kanisha D. Bond is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study culture, violence, and contentious political mobilization, with a special focus on how ideology, race, and gender influence institution-building among radical groups in polarized societies. Her scholarship can be found in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Negotiation, Political Science Research and Methods, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, International Studies Review, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and Contemporary Political Theory. Her public interest writings on the politics of (studying) radical mobilization have been published by Foreign Policy, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, the Social Science Research Council; her thoughts on the same have featured in various print and web-based interviews. Bond also co-convenes the Advancing Research on Conflict Consortium, which supports and facilitates methodological training and intellectual community for researchers conducting fieldwork in fragile and violence-affected environments.

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.

Charles Crabtree is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and director of the Fundamental Needs Lab. He is a scholar of discrimination, researching it in new populations, sometimes for understudied identity groups, across new contexts, and with the goal of testing new theoretical mechanisms and ways of reducing it. He also develops better methodological approaches for measuring discrimination. Most of his work uses field or survey experiments and has focused primarily on the United States. To put his work there in a broader perspective and better understand the global variation he also does research in many other places, particularly Eastern Europe and Japan; He has spent years living in those contexts and has done extensive fieldwork there. His research has been published or is forthcoming in over 40 journals or volumes across several fields, including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Nature Human Behavior, Political Analysis, Public Administration Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tasha Fairfield is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, with a Ph.D. in political science from UC 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. She received APSA’s 2024 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award for her work on Bayesian analysis for qualitative research (with A.E. Charman), including “Explicit Bayesian Analysis for Process Tracing” (Political Analysis 2017), which won APSA’s QMMR 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. She convenes the Qualitative Bayesian Reasoning Network for scholars interested in employing the method. Her current research examines the debate on SARS-CoV-2 origins from a Bayesian perspective. She is also interested in climate-change politics. In September 2025, Fairfield will be joining the European University Institute as Chair in Political and Social Sciences.

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, MI. 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).

Ezequiel González Ocantos is Professor of Comparative & Judicial Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College.. He has published four books: Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016), winner of the Herman Pritchett Best Book Award from APSA’s Law and Courts Section, the best book award from ISA’s Human Rights Section, and the Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from LASA’s Political Institutions Section; The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms and Capability Building (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Prosecutors, Voters, and the Criminalisation of Corruption in Latin America (with Paula Muñoz, Nara Pavao, and Viviana Baraybar; Cambridge University Press, 2023), which won the Charles Levine Memorial Book Prize from IPSA and received an honorable mention from LASA’s Donna Lee Van Cott Best Book Award committee; and The Limits of Judicialization: From Progress to Backlash in Latin America (co-edited with Sandra Botero and Daniel Brinks; Cambridge University Press, 2022). Ezequiel has also written on courts and backsliding, , the relationship between judges and public opinion, and process tracing methods. He currently co-edits Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Research.

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 (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. His 2023 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 was President of the APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section, co-edited the section’s publication, and co-chair of the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations and is currently co-editor of Cambridge University Press’s Methods of Social Inquiry book series. In 2017, Jacobs was co-recipient of the QMMR section’s David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.

Diana Kapiszewski is 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 democratic backsliding and the “architecture of accountability” in Latin America, how research methods are used in political science scholarship, and how Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) can enhance scholarship in the law and society tradition. Kapiszewski directs SIGLA (the States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America database project, www.sigladata.org) and co-directs IQMR.

Marcus Kreuzer is Professor 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. A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2023). {Listen to book talk) 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.

Lauren MacLean is the Dean’s Professor of Political Economy and Civic Engagement and the Department Chair 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 Carnegie, NSF, SSRC, RWJ, and Fulbright-Hays. She has a forthcoming book 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, 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.

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).

Rob Mickey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on U.S. politics in comparative and historical perspective. He is interested in the country’s belated democratization by the 1970s, its current democratic backsliding, and the place of racial conflict in each. He is the author of Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton University Press). With David Waldner (UVA), he is currently writing a book on America’s post-conflict efforts to construct democratic polities and diverse economies in societies featuring labor-repressive agriculture. The cases range from Reconstruction to Iraq & Afghanistan. With Ashley Jardina (UVA) and Vince Hutchings (Michigan), he is writing a book on the relationship of racial attitudes to support for democracy in the U.S. With Jake Grumbach (Berkeley) and Dan Ziblatt (Harvard), he is writing a set of papers on the historical legacies of mid-20th century urban racial conflict for America’s contemporary policing. In 2024, Matt Lassiter (Michigan) and Mickey drafted the policing section of the Harms Report for the Detroit’s Reparations Task Force. He is currently working with Washtenaw County on their similar efforts as part of the Rackham Graduate School’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Study.

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. She is the author of Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2023), which won the Routledge Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Study of Political Violence and an Honorable Mention for Best Book in Middle East and North Africa Politics from APSA’s Middle East and North Africa Politics Organized Section. Parkinson has published award-winning research on militant organizations’ decision-making and internal dynamics, political violence, refugees’ 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. She is a co-founder and co-convener of the Advancing Research on Conflict Consortium.

Tesalia Rizzo Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced. Reyes is also a Research Affiliate at MIT Governance Lab and at the Stanford Governance Project. Additionally, Rizzo Reyes is affiliated with CAPE and co-direct the PEARS Lab at UC Merced. Her research focuses on the political economy of development, with an emphasis on how everyday interactions between individuals and the state, their bureaucracy and public spaces shape political behavior and impact democratic quality in Mexico.

Jonnell Robinson is an Associate Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University and the Director of the Syracuse Community Geography Program. Her community-based and participatory research brings faculty, students, and community members together to investigate a wide range of community concerns at the local scale using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and participatory action research praxis. Her research focuses on how and why grassroots organizations use mapping and spatial analysis to further advance their advocacy, education, and organizing work. She teaches courses in introductory GIS, Urban GIS, Health GIS, participatory research methods, and community geography.

Jaye Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Professor Seawright’s research interests include comparative politics, with an emphasis on democratic backsliding; and methodology, particularly involving multi-method research designs and issues of causal inference. She is the author of Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools and Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela and the co-author of Billionaires and Stealth Politics and Finding your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox.

Fiona Shen Bayh is an Assistant Professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland. She studies the politics of authoritarian regimes, specifically the legal and judicial instruments of power. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Law and Society Series) examines these themes in the context of postcolonial Africa. In 2023, it won the Theodore J. Lowri First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize in the Comparative Study of Democracy & Autocracy. In other works, she examines the challenges of promoting access to justice and the legacies of autocratic rule. As a faculty affiliate of the Interdisciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science (iLCSS), she draws on a variety of digital tools and data to analyze the political economy of development in the Global South. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, World Politics, The Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press.

Nicholas Rush Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and the Graduate Center 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). Simmons and Smith jointly won the 2023 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from APSA’s QMMR Section for their work on comparison and ethnography. His work has been published or is forthcoming in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and Violence: An International Journal.

Hillel David Soifer is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. . He has a BA in the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College, an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in Government from Harvard. His first book State Building in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press, and 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, which will be the subject of his teaching at IQMR.

Jessie Trudeau is an Assistant professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Trudeau’s research focuses on organized crime and policing, primarily in Brazil. She is currently revising her book manuscript, “Machine Gun Politics: Why Politicians Cooperate with Criminal Groups,” which explains why local candidates collude electorally with criminal organizations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in World Development and Economia. She teaches courses on comparative politics, including the politics of crime and violence, politics of geography, Brazilian politics and research methods. Previously, Trudeau was a postdoctoral fellow with Brown University’s Program for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She won the 2023 American Political Science Association (APSA) Urban and Local Politics Section’s Best Dissertation Award and the 2022 APSA Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award. Her research has been funded by UNU-WIDER, Meta, UNDP, and Corporación Andino de Fomiento. Trudeau earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2022.

Guadalupe Tuñón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy, with a regional focus on Latin America. She employs a multi-method approach that combines experimental and natural experimental data with archival research.

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.