IQMR 2026 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).

Yuna Blajer de la Garza is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches political theory. Broadly interested in democratic theory and egalitarianism, her research examines how membership in democratic political communities is articulated and negotiated, not only through formal rights, but as a matter of everyday democratic practices and norms, discourses, emotions, and belonging. Her work combines theoretical debates with interpretive methods, seeking to ground abstract theories in empirical realities. Her book manuscript, A House is Not a Home: Citizenship and Belonging in Democratic Communities (under contract, Oxford University Press), spotlights “the citizen who does not belong” to discuss belonging as a political concept that captures experiences of incomplete political membership not properly accounted for by current democratic theory. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Ethics & International Affairs, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Journal of Politics, Political Theory, and Politics & Society. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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 L. 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 (The Long Shadow of Extraction: The Origins of Indigenous Autonomy Demands, 2025), 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 joined the European University Institute as Chair in Political and Social Sciences in September 2025. She holds a Ph.D in political science from UC Berkeley and was previously an associate professor at the LSE. Her comparative politics research has analyzed the political economy of inequality, the politics of policy formulation, and business-state relations in Latin America. Fairfield received the 2024 APSA-QMMR David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award for her methodological work on Bayesian analysis for qualitative research, including Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference (CUP 2022), 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. Fairfield’s research has appeared in journals including Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. Her current research interests include the distributive politics of climate change.

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).

Diana Kapiszewski is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, Co-Director of the Georgetown Democracy Initiative, and Co-Director of IQMR. 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 judicial resistance thereto; institutions of electoral governance in Latin America; the use of research methods in political science scholarship; and how Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) can enhance scholarship in the law and society tradition.

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 looks at 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.

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).

Jamila Michener is a professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University, an inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, and Senior Associate Dean for Public Engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on poverty, racism, and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is the author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton University Press, 2026). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2024). Michener’s research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Her public writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and many other outlets. She works closely with community-based organizations around the country to apply research insights to address urgent problems facing racially and economically marginalized communities.

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.

Jonnell Robinson is 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 the politics of the far right; 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, and the forthcoming The Practice of Multi-Method Research: Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Methods.

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.

Erica S. Simmons is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she 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, together with Nicholas Rush Smith, was also recognized by the American Political Science Association with the David Collier Mid-Career Award for her contributions to qualitative methods. Simmons holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Sociology and is the Faculty Director of the International Studies Major. Simmons received an AB from Harvard College (1999) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2012). Simmons’s work is motivated by an interest in contentious politics, particular in Latin America. 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 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 The American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. Her work has also appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Theory and Society, among others.

Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London 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 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.

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, Qualitative Causal Inference and Explanation, will be published by Cambridge University Press in June, 2026. His current book project is titled Reconstruction in Comparative Perspective. 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.

Amanda Weiss is an assistant professor of political methodology at Cornell. She works on challenges that real-world heterogeneity poses for causal inference. One strand of her research program focuses on observational causal inference, especially modern difference-in-differences. The other, closely related strand focuses on design and ethics for experiments. Her substantive interests are in American politics and policy and she is coauthoring a book on the local political consequences of prisons. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and M.A. in statistics from Yale, as well as an M.S.W. and B.A. from Columbia.