New Faculty Join the Political Science Department
August 3, 2008
David Carter joins Penn State in fall 2008 from the University of Rochester, where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in Political Science. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. His current research focuses on territory and international disputes, conflicts between states and rebel/insurgent groups, strategic vote buying in the United Nations General Assembly with foreign aid disbursements, and statistical techniques for analyzing these issues. His paper, “The Strategy of Territorial Conflict,” received the 2006 Stuart A. Bremer Award for best graduate student paper presented at the annual Peace Science Society (International) meeting. He will be teaching courses on terrorism and insurgency, and international bargaining. More on David Carter….
Bumba Mukherjee will begin teaching as an Associate Professor in International Political Economy and quantitative methods at Penn State in August 2008. He holds a B.A. with Honors from the University of Delhi, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, an M. Phil. from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 2004. He has published a number of articles on international trade, investment, exchange rates, and other topics. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Princeton University in 2006/07. He taught at Florida State and at Notre Dame before coming to Penn State; here, he’ll be teaching courses on international political economy and quantitative methods. More on Bumba Mukherjee…
Joseph Wright will join us as an Assistant Professor in fall 2008, specializing in comparative politics and political economy. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA in 2007, and holds an M.A. in Political Economy and a B.A. in Spanish Literature from Washington University (St. Louis, MO). He also studied at the Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica in Santiago, Chile. In 2007/08, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University ; and this year he will be on leave from Penn State, as a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Joe’s dissertation, Foreign Aid and Political Regimes: How Aid Affects Economic Growth and Democracy, won the Western Political Science Association’s 2007 award for the best dissertation. He studies comparative political economy in the developing world, with an interest in how international flows such as foreign aid, trade, and migration affect domestic politics in dictatorships and democracies. More on Joe Wright….
Deniz Aksoy will begin teaching this year as a Lecturer in Political Science, specializing in the politics of the EU and in migration and ethnic politics. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 2008, and is the co-author (wht Jonathan Rodden) of "Legislative Representation and Transfers in the European Union" forthcoming in the European Journal of Public Finance and Management.
James Binney will also begin teaching this year as a Lecturer in Political Science, offering courses in Comparative Politics. He holds a B.A. from Penn State, and a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. His teaching experience includes courses at several colleges/universities, including Northern Kentucky and Norwich. He will be offering courses at Penn State on comparative politics, politics of developing areas, and ethnic and racial politics.