Faculty P-Z

Government - The Faculty, 2009-10 (P-Z)

Elizabeth Perry (PhD, University of Michigan, 1978) is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Govern­ment and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She is a comparativist with special expertise in the politics of China. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she sits on the editorial boards of nearly a dozen major scholarly journals. Perry’s research focuses on popular protest and grassroots politics in modern and contemporary China. Her books include Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (1980); Chinese Perspectives on the Nien Rebellion (1981); The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (1985); Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (1992); Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Chinese Cities (1995); Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Iden­tities in East Asia (1996); Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (1997); Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1997); Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (2000); Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (2002); Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (2002); Patrolling the Revolution: Workers, Citizenship and the Modern Chinese State (2006); and Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China (2007). Her book, Shanghai on Strike: the Politics of Chinese Labor (1993), won the John King Fairbank prize from the American Historical Association.

Paul Peterson (PhD, Chicago, 1967) is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Editor-In-Chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. He is a former director of the Governmental Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Peterson is the author or editor of over one hundred articles and thirty-plus books, including School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy (Brookings, 2007); Reforming Education in Florida: A Study Prepared by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education (Hoover, 2006); The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Revised Edition) (Brookings, 2006); Generational Change: Closing the Test Score Gap (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability (Brookings, 2003); The Future of School Choice (Hoover, 2003); Our Schools and our Future... Are We Still At Risk? (Hoover, 2003); Learning From School Choice (Brookings, 1998); The Price of Federalism (Brookings, 1995); The Urban Underclass (Brookings, 1991); The Poli­tics of School Reform: 1870-1940 (University of Chicago, 1985); The New Urban Reality (Brookings, 1985); City Limits (University of Chicago, 1981); and School Politics Chicago Style (University of Chicago, 1976). Three of his books have received major awards from the American Political Science Association.

After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago, he was a professor for many years there in the Departments of Political Science and Education. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Founda­tion, and the Center for Study in the Behav­ioral Sciences.

He is a member of the independent review panel advising the Department of Education’s evaluation of the No Child Left Behind law. The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center reported that Peterson’s studies on school choice and vouchers were among the country’s most influential studies of education policy.

Susan J. Pharr (PhD, Columbia, 1975) is Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics and director of the Program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard University. She joined the faculty in 1987, and served as chair of the government department, 1992-95, and as associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 1996-98. She is on the Steering Committee of the Asia Center, on the Execu­tive Committees of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and on the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Pharr is a member of the University Committee on the Environment and the University Committee on the Status of Women. She is also a senior scholar of the Harvard Academy of Interna­tional and Area Studies. Pharr has served as staff associate at the Social Sciences Research Council, and on the faculty of the Depart­ment of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She held the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and Interna­tional Studies in Washington, was a visiting scholar or fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and at Keio University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, and the Brookings Institution. She also has served as a senior social scientist with the Agency for International Development. Much of her research has explored the social basis for democracy with a particular focus on Japan and East Asia. Her research inter­ests include comparative political behavior; comparative politics of industrialized nations; democratization and social change; political development; civil society and nonprofit organizations; political ethics and corruption; environmental politics; the role of the media in politics; the role of Japan and the US in development; international relations in East Asia; and international political economy of development. Among her works are Political Women in Japan (1981); Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan (1990); (with Ellis S. Krauss) Media and Politics in Japan (1996); (with Robert D. Putnam) Disaffected Democra­cies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? (2000); and (with Frank J. Schwartz) The State of Civil Society in Japan (2003).

Matthew B. Platt is an assistant professor of government. His research and teaching interests include black politics, agenda setting, representation, and political participation. Currently, his research concerns the policy consequences of non-voting political activity and the changing nature of black descriptive representation.

Robert D. Putnam (PhD, Yale University, 1970) is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the American Political Science Association. He was the 2006 recip­ient of the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious international award for scholarly achievement in political science. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”

He has written a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best­selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of new forms of social connectedness. His Making Democracy Work was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences world­wide in the last half century.

Putnam has worked on these themes with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as with British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and many other national leaders and grassroots activists around the world. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners from across America to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.

His earlier work included research on political elites, Italian politics, and globaliza­tion. Before coming to Harvard in 1979, he taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the National Security Council. He is currently working on four major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) strategies for social integration in the context of immigration and ethnic diversity, (3) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (4) growing class dispari­ties among American youth.

James Robinson (PhD, Yale, 1993) James Robinson (PhD, Yale, 1993) is Professor of Government, Harvard University and a faculty associate of the Institute for Quanti­tative Social Science. His research interests lie in political economy and economic and political development. Some of his publica­tions include; “Why did the West Extend the Franchise?” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2000, “A Theory of Political Transi­tions,” American Economic Review, September 2001, “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development,” American Economic Review, December 2001, “Inefficient Redistribution,” American Political Science Review, September 2001, “Reversal of Fortune,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2002. His books include The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, with Daron Acemoglu) which won the 2007 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award awarded by the American Political Science Association for “the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs” and the 2007 William Riker Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association for the best book in political economy published in 2006. He is co-editor with Jared Diamond of Natural Experiments in History to be published in 2009 by Harvard University Press.

Michael Rosen (D. Phil., Oxford Univer­sity, 1980) is Professor of Government. He has published widely in social and political thought and in Continental (especially, German) philosophy. He is the author of Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism (1982) and On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996). He co-translated the first English-language edition of Kant’s Opus Postumum (1993). As well as his work on Continental thought, he is engaged in contemporary debates in Anglo-American political philosophy. He is at present editing (with Brian Leiter) the Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy.

Stephen Peter Rosen (PhD, Harvard, 1979) is the Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University, and the director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. For the years 2002-2007, he is also a Harvard College Professor, an award given in recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching. Rosen was the civilian assistant to the Director, Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; the director of Political-Military Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council; and a professor in the Strategy Department at the Naval War College. He was a consultant to the President’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, and to the Gulf War Air Power Survey sponsored by the secretary of the Air Force, and has been the leader of study groups at the OSD Summer Studies at Newport, Rhode Island. He has published articles on ballistic missile defense, the American theory of limited war, the stra­tegic implications of the AIDS epidemic, and strategies for promoting innovation in the American Military in International Security, The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Policy, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Joint Forces Quar­terly, and Diplomatic History. He is the author of Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, which won the 1992 Furniss Prize for best first book on national security affairs awarded by the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and of Societies and Military Power: India and its Armies. He has completed a book on the biology of cognition and strategy entitled War and Human Nature (forthcoming, 2004). His next project is a book on imperial strategy.

Nancy Rosenblum (PhD, Harvard, 1973) is Chair of the Department of Government and the Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government. Her field of research is political theory, both historical and contem­porary political thought. She is the author most recently of On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship. Other books include Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (1998), which was awarded the APSA David Easton Prize in 2000. Her recent edited works include Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair with Martha Minow (2002); Obli­gations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democra­cies (2000); and Civil Society and Government, co-edited with Robert Post. Rosenblum is working on The Quality of Life, based on a study of Henry David Thoreau. In addition to government courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, Rosenblum offers a course on legalism in the moral reasoning core curriculum.

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. His books include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1998), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007), and Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). His work has been translated into Chinese, Japa­nese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portu­guese, Greek, Polish, and Korean. His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times.

Sandel’s courses include “Ethics, Biotech­nology, and the Future of Human Nature,” “Markets, Morals, and Law,” and “Global­ization and Its Critics.” His undergraduate course, “Justice,” has enrolled over 14,000 students. A recipient of the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, Sandel was named a Harvard College Professor in 1999, and in 2008 was recognized by the American Political Science Association for a career of excellence in teaching.

Sandel has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (Paris), delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford Univer­sity, and in 2007 gave a series of lectures at universities throughout China. In 2009, he delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

From 2002 to 2005, Sandel served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, a national body appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. The recipient of three honorary degrees, Sandel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. A summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis Univer­sity (1975), Sandel received his doctorate from Oxford University (D.Phil.,1981), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Kenneth A. Shepsle (PhD, Rochester, 1970) is the George D. Markham Professor of Govern­ment. He is the author or co-author of Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability; The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle: Democratic Committee Assignments in the Modern House; Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition, Making and Breaking Governments; American Government: Power and Purpose. He has edited or co-edited The Congressional Budget Process: Some Views From the Inside; Political Equilib­rium, Perspectives on Positive Political Economy; Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Govern­ment. He has authored numerous articles on formal political theory, congressional politics, public policy, and political economy. Shepsle is a former national fellow at the Hoover Institution, fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Guggen­heim Fellow. He was editor of Public Choice from 1975 to 1980. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current research continues to emphasize formal models of political institutions, accen­tuating the interface between politics and demography.

Beth Simmons (PhD, Harvard, 1991) is Clar­ence Dillon Professor of International Affairs and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Her fields of interest and course subjects are international relations, international political economy, and interna­tional law. Her most recent book is entitled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 2009). She also authored Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy; During the Interwar Years, 1923-1939 (Princeton University Press, 1994), which won the 1995 American Political Science Associa­tion Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book published in the previous year in govern­ment, politics, or international relations. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She is on leave at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University Law School for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Prerna Singh (PhD, Princeton, 2009) is assis­tant professor in the Department of Govern­ment. Her research and teaching interests include the causes and consequences of iden­tity politics and public policy with a focus on developing countries, particularly South Asia. Her current project entitled “Subnationalism and Social Development: A Comparative Analysis of Indian States” seeks to develop a theory of how variations in the cohesiveness of subnational identification trigger different trajectories of state and societal action as regards social policy, which together generate differences in education and health outcomes. She is also working on a project that develops a measure of the degree to which states have institutionalized ethnicity across space and over time. Singh is also co-editing The Rout-ledge Handbook of Indian Politics.

Theda Skocpol (PhD, Harvard, 1975) is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. At Harvard, she has served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005-2007) and as Director of the Center for American Political Studies (2000­2006). In 1996, Skocpol served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group, and in 2002-03, she served as President of the Amer­ican Political Science Association during the centennial of this leading professional body. In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her “visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence.” The Skytte Prize is one of the largest and most prestigious in political science and is awarded annually by the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University (Sweden) to the scholar who in the view of the foundation has made the most valuable contribution to the discipline. Skocpol has also been elected to membership in all three major U.S. interdisciplinary honor societies: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1994), the American Philosophical Society (elected 2006), and the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2008). Skocpol’s work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) and American politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Among her other works are Bringing the State Back In (1985, with Peter Evans and Dietrich Rueschemeyer); Social Policy in the United States (1995); Boomerang: Clinton’s Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in US Politics (1996); Civic Engagement in American Democ­racy (1999, with Morris Fiorina); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (2005, with Lawrence R. Jacobs); What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and The Struggle for Racial Equality (2006, with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz); and The Transfor­mation of American Politics: Activist Govern­ment and the Rise of Conservatism (2007, with Paul Pierson). Her books and articles have been widely cited in political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the Amer­ican Political Science Association for the best book in political science for the previous year. Skocpol’s research focuses on US social welfare policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. She has recently launched new projects on the development of U.S. higher education and on the transformation of U.S. federal policies in the Obama era.

Arthur Spirling (PhD, University of Roch­ester, 2008), assistant professor of Govern­ment. Interests in political methodology, comparative politics and the analysis of legis­lative voting. In terms of research methods, Spirling’s current focus is on the application of generalized linear models in political science, non-parametric techniques, applied Bayesian statistics and item response theory. His work has appeared in Political Analysis, The American Statistician, The Political Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics. Current proj­ects include coauthored work with Harvard colleague Kevin Quinn on roll call voting in the House of Commons, and a new project on the strategic writing and negotiation of American Indian treaties.

Dennis F. Thompson (PhD, Harvard, 1968) is professor of government and the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is also a professor in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the founding director of the university-wide ethics program, now the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center. He also served as Harvard’s Associate Provost from 1996-2001, and as Senior Adviser to the Presi­dent of the university from 2001-04. Thomp­son’s most recent books include Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States; and Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare. His other books include Democracy and Disagree­ment; and Why Deliberative Democracy? (both jointly authored with Amy Gutmann); The Democratic Citizen: Social Science and Demo­cratic Theory in the 20th Century; John Stuart Mill and Representative Government; Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption; and Political Ethics and Public Office, which won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer award for the best political science publication in the field of US national policy in 1987. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Political Theory, and Ethics, among other journals. Thompson’s current teaching and research concentrate on democratic theory and political ethics.

Richard Tuck (PhD, Jesus College, Cam­bridge University, 1976) is professor of government and a premier scholar of the history of political thought. His works include Natural Rights Theories (1979); Hobbes (1989); and Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (1993). They address a variety of topics including political authority, human rights, natural law, and toleration, and focus on thinkers including Hobbes, Grotius, Selden, and Descartes. His current work focuses on political thought and international law, and traces the history of thought about inter­national politics from Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and Vattel, to Kant. Tuck is also engaged in a work on the origins of 12th-century economic thought in which he argues that the “free rider” problem was only invented, as a problem, in recent decades. His interests span concerns in all subfields of the discipline.

Sidney Verba (PhD, Princeton, 1959) is Professor Emeritus. He is the author and co-author of books on American and comparative politics including Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961); The Civic Culture (1963); Caste, Race and Politics (1969); Vietnam and the Silent Majority (1970); Participation in America (1972); The Changing American Voter (1976); Injury to Insult (1979); Participation and Political Equality (1979); Equality in America (1985); Elites and the Idea of Equality (1989); Designing Social Inquiry (1994); Voice and Equality (1995); and The Private Roots Of Public Action (2001) as well as many articles on those subjects. Participation in America won the Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the best book on American politics, and The Changing American Voter won the Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in political science. In 1993, Verba won the James Madison Prize of the APSA for a career contribution to the discipline; and in 2002, he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize, an international award for distinguished contribution to political science. In 1994, he was elected president of the APSA. Verba is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has chaired the Policy Committee of the Social Science Research Council and the Committee on International Conflict and Cooperation of the National Academy of Sciences, and is currently the Chair of the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences. His current research interests involve the relationship of political to economic equality, mass and elite political ideologies, and mass political participation. Verba was also director of the University Library.

Daniel Ziblatt (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2002) is the Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Government at Harvard University and a Faculty Associate of Harvard’s Center for European Studies. His research interests are in comparative politics, focusing chiefly on democratization, state-building, elections in new democracies and authoritarian regimes, federalism, contemporary Europe, European political development and comparative-historical methods. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy, Germany, and the Puzzle of Federalism, (Princeton University Press, 2006) as well as articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, German Politics and Society, and Communist and Postcommunist Studies. He has been a DAAD-fellow and SSRC-Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, Germany and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, Germany and University of Konstanz (Germany). He is currently working on a project that offers a new interpretation of Europe’s pathway to democracy from the nineteenth century to the present.