Department of Government Newsletter — June 2017 Contents Greetings
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Department of Government Newsletter — June 2017 Contents Greetings from the Chair 2 Faculty News 3 New Faculty Appointments 3 Accomplishments and Achievements 4 Augmentations 11 Student and Alumni Achievements 12 Dissertation Prizes 15 Graduate Placement 16 Twitter and blogs 17 Event Highlights 17 Happy Birthday Sid Verba! 18 Sidney, We Want Another Song! 19 Sidney Verba: Dayenu 20 Toast 21 Greetings 22 Department of Government Newsletter June 2017 Greetings from the Chair Hello, I am delighted to welcome you to the second bi-annual (almost) newsletter from the Department of Government. We have had fun collecting interesting pieces of news, ranging from two new departmental babies to publications and honors—and we hope you have fun reading them. We have a pretty impressive set of colleagues, students, and alumni, if I do say so myself. It has, of course, been a busy and intense spring. In addition to the usual breakneck pace of teaching, advising, participating in committees, traveling, and attempting to do a little research and writing in the interstices, we have all been mesmerized by the political goings-on in the United States, Great Britain, France, North Korea, Syria, Brazil, and elsewhere. Whatever else one can say about the contemporary political environment, it is generating full employment for political scientists both inside and out of academia. It gives me some gratification even in this complex political moment to realize how many of us there are in various locations, and how well we have been taught and continue to absorb and disseminate ideas, values, and information. I was pleased to hear from some of you after the first newsletter, so it would be great to hear more. Several people suggested some sort of mechanism for Gov Department PhD alumni to be directly in touch with one another. That is a great idea, and if any of you want to take it up and create that mechanism, please let me know. If we get no volunteers, we will try to spend some time this summer setting up an easy, maintenance-free way to connect you with one another (but see previous paragraph…). Two stalwarts of the department’s staff are retiring this summer—Joanna Lindh and Diana Wojcik. We will greatly miss them, and their help and expertise, but we wish them the best in retirement. Some faculty retirements are also on the horizon, but luckily none right now. Best to all, Jennifer [email protected] Faculty News: New Faculty Appointments Katrina Forrester o Katrina Forrester is a lecturer in political thought at Queen Mary University of London. In the summer 2017, she will become an assistant professor of Government and Social Studies. Katrina took her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge. During her PhD, she spent a year at Harvard University. In 2012-14, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and in Spring 2015 she was a visiting scholar at NYU Gallatin. In Spring 2016 she was a program director for the intercollegiate MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History. She will teach feminist theory and contemporary political philosophy; she has also written on climate change, American intellectual history, and pornography (in The New Yorker). Katrina’s first book is Reinventing Morality: A History of American Political Thought since the 1950s (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Pia Raffler Pia Raffler is a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University; she joins the Government Department as an assistant professor in the fall of 2017. She studies the political economy of local governance, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her dissertation research focuses on political oversight of bureaucrats and implications for public service provision in local governments in Uganda. It has won the Best Fieldwork Award and an honorable mention for Best Graduate Student Paper on African Affairs from the American Political Science Association. Pia uses experimental, quasi- experimental and qualitative methods to measure causal effects and seek to disentangle the underlying mechanisms. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Pia will teach in the fields of political economy of development, African politics, and experimental methods. Accomplishments and Activities Daniele Allen Danielle Allen, University Professor of Government, and her colleague Emily Sneff announced a discovery of a previously unknown early handwritten parchment of the Declaration deep within a provincial archive in Britain. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/arts/a-new-parchment-declaration- of-independence-surfaces-head-scratching-ensues.html?_r=0 http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/declaration-different- from-any-copy-we-had-seen/ Timothy Colton Professor Colton was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen), Vienna, September– December 2016, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor, National University of Singapore, January–June 2017. He recently published Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, September 2016), and Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Adelphi Books, International Institute for Strategic Studies, January 2017) (with Samuel Charap), as well as a special issue on “Russia Beyond Putin,” Daedalus (spring 2017) and “Who Defects? Unpacking a Defection Cascade from Russia's Dominant Party 2008–12,” American Political Science Review (May 2017) (with Henry E. Hale). Tim was awarded the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, Harvard University, 2017, “for distinguished accomplishments in the fields of literature, history, or art, broadly conceived,” with reference to Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know. Carlos E. Diaz Rosillo Harvard government lecturer and Dunster House resident dean Carlos E. Diaz Rosillo accepted a position in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration to serve as the Director of Policy and Interagency Coordination in the Office of the Senior Advisor to the President for Policy http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/19/diaz-rosillo-trump- administration/ Jorge Dominguez Professor Dominguez and his co-editors published a book Social Policies and Decentralization in Cuba: Change in the Context of 21st Century Latin America. Among many other elements, it “had also a brief description of my being investigated by the US government for paying for coffee and cookies in Cuba under the Bush administration without a prior specific license for this purpose.” Ryan Enos Professor Enos received an award for his project on intergenerational mobility from Russell Sage Foundation https://www.russellsage.org/new-small-awards-intergenerational-mobility- united-states Do Public Works Programs Increase Intergenerational Mobility? Evidence from the Works Administration Enos will investigate the extent to which the state can facilitate intergenerational mobility by studying the implementation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between 1935-43. He hypothesizes that increased individual-level participation in the WPA program and county- level exposure to WPA spending should increase intergenerational mobility at the individual and county levels, respectively. Enos will utilize a micro and macro level research design. He will collect original data on WPA participation; link them to the 1915 Iowa State Census records and the 1940 Federal Census. He will then use machine learning algorithms to automate the record linkage process. At the county-level, Enos will use data on WPA spending combined with data from the Equality of Opportunity project. For causal identification, he will leverage age eligibility discontinuities in individual-level WPA participation and topographical features to produce exogenous variation in the individual propensity to sign up for the WPA program and the county-level demand for WPA spending. A former undergraduate made a gift to the Harvard GSE in Ryan’s honor through the “Applaud an Educator Initiative.” Its goal was to recognize the professor’s many contributions to her own education. Ryan also finished his book “The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics”; it will be published this fall by Cambridge University Press. Jennifer Hochschild Professor Hochschild posted two blogs - at the Brookings Institution on “What happens next? A tour of social scientists’ predictions for the Trump presidency” and at e-International Relations, on “What will Americans, Britons, or Hungarians do in the name of nationalism?” https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/01/06/tour-of-trump- predictions/ http://www.e-ir.info/2017/05/31/what-will-americans-britons-or- hungarians-do-in-the-name-of-nationalism/ She was a Visiting Lecturer for Phi Beta Kappa in 2016-17, spending about three days at each of eight colleges and universities. She taught classes, met with terrific students and faculty across the social sciences (and occasionally humanities), and gave a public lecture at each school. Jennifer hosted the Cambridge-Harvard-Oxford workshop on “Inequality, Politics, Policy, and Culture in the Post-industrial World”. The theme of the meeting was “populism, old and new, left and right.” It brought together a fantastic set of scholars on contemporary and historical manifestations of populist politics; they came from the United States, Britain, and France. Thanks to the Weatherhead Center and the HKS Weiner Center for support, and to Ph.D. student Kaneesha