Director Helen Milner is delighted to announce that the new cohort of Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG) Fellows, chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe, will be in residence from July 2024 through June 2025 to pursue their own research projects and contribute to the intellectual life of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
NCGG Postdoctoral Fellows
Jiseon Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on international relations and methods. She completed two degrees from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea): a B.A. in economics and international studies at Underwood International College and a master’s concentrating on international development cooperation and international trade and economic development at the Graduate School of International Studies. Her broad research interests include international development, human rights, poverty, inequality, political economy of foreign aid, experimental methods, and individual-level misperceptions and misinformation. Her dissertation project applies a mixed methods approach, including survey experiments, field experiments, and qualitative in-depth interviews, to explore when and how (mis)perceptions of foreign aid influenced by (mis)information and experience could be corrected or worsened in developing countries.
Samuel Houskeeper is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University’s Political Science Department. His work focuses on international political economy, particularly international environmental politics. His dissertation focuses on climate change as an international cooperation and bargaining problem. He is a methodological pluralist, but specializes in quantitative empirics. He holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Northwestern University.
Sichen Li is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her scholarly interests are centered on the politics of trade and cross-border investment, with a particular focus on how great power competition shapes governments’ role in trade and investment policymaking. Li’s dissertation explores how technological rivalry among major economies makes governments play an increasingly active role in initiating anti-globalization policies. Her research employs a mixed-method approach that integrates network analysis, text analysis, field interviews, and comparative case studies.
Claas Mertens received his Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. His research focuses on international economic conflicts, such as economic sanctions and weaponized interdependencies, and the international political economy of climate change. It also explores intersections between these two areas. His work has been published in International Studies Quarterly and The Review of International Organizations. He holds an MPhil in Politics from Oxford and a BA in Business from the University of St. Gallen, and he was a visiting student at Harvard. Before his Ph.D., he worked as a management consultant. Claas was Rowing World Champion in 2015 and represented Oxford in the 2018 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. Now, he enjoys surfing, where his passion far exceeds his skills.
Maria Nagawa is a joint Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University specializing in the political economy of development. She studies the dynamics of governance and development including the role of bureaucrats, international actors, and traditional institutions. The main strand of her research explores the effects of aid on the incentives of bureaucrats in aid-recipient countries. Her other research interests include the role of traditional leaders in political participation and in public service provision in the African context and NGO responses to state repression. Nagawa blends quantitative and qualitative methods in her work, including survey experiments that draw from in-depth interviews. She has held various research positions with the Embassy of France in Uganda, the Trade Facilitation Office in the Canada Department of Global Affairs, the BRICS Policy Center in Brazil, the Economic Policy Research Centre in Uganda, and the University of Colorado Denver in the United States. Maria has also taught Ugandan Economy, Regional Integration, and International Business Economics at Makerere University Business School in Uganda. While at Princeton, Maria will continue to study institutional efficacy in the Global South including the role of bureaucrats in development.
Zarlasht M. Razeq received her Ph.D. in Political Science (IR) from McGill University in the Fall of 2023. Her research interests are in the IPE of trade, GVCs, and FDI. Her dissertation examined the effect of trade institutions (deep PTAs) on global value chains (GVCs) at the country and firm levels. Her current projects expand on her dissertation research and focus on MNCs’ supply chain networks, FDI and climate change, and the role of international trade institutions in supply chain resilience. In 2022, her work won the UNCTAD & the Academy of International Business Award for Best Research on Investment and Development. In the 2023/2024 academic year, she was a Research Fellow at the Warwick Business School U.K., where she worked on the analysis of supply chains and FDI. In 2023, she served as a consultant for UNCTAD’s Division on Investment and Enterprise in Geneva. Zarlasht also holds an M.A. in International Development and an M.A. in International Affairs, specializing in global political economy (GPE).
Theo Serlin is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University, studying international and comparative political economy. His research integrates economic geography into political economy models of policy preferences and electoral politics. Accounting for variation in the efficiency of government provision between rural and urban areas and migration as a mechanism of economic adjustment generates new and often counter-intuitive predictions about political alignments and reactions to economic change. He tests these theories using newly-digitized historical data and modern causal inference methods. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review and received the David A. Lake Award for best paper presented at the 2022 meeting of the International Political Economy Society. Theo graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2018 with an A.B. in History and received a M.A. in Economics from Stanford in 2022.
Hao Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research lies at the intersection of international relations, political economy, applied statistical models, and formal political theory. His book project examines how the rise of global production networks reshape trade coalitions within and across national borders, with regional focuses on U.S. and China. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science and The Chinese Journal of International Politics and has also won the Best Paper in International Relations Award from the Midwest Political Science Association. Before MIT, he received a B.A. in International Political Economy from Renmin University of China, an M.A. in International Politics from Tsinghua University, and a second M.A. in International Economics and China Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
Visiting Fellows
Sarah Brooks is a Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University (Ph.D., Duke University) in the Department of Political Science. In the field of international political economy, her research examines the political economy of sovereign risk and global capital flows, most recently focusing on the interaction between investor behavior and government actors in sovereign debt markets. Other recent projects include a series of analyses of the "resource curse," which challenge conventional views of the political and economic effects of natural resource wealth. Her newest extension of this research examines the role of critical minerals and the politics of their development in the green transition. She also has a series of papers on the political effects of risk and insecurity on democratic citizenship in South Africa.
Dennis Quinn is the Powers Professor of International Business, at McDonough School of Business, and a Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Dean at McDonough. His research specialties include international political economy, international business, and international economics. Recent topics include the effects of trade exposure and exchange rate changes on election outcomes in the US and abroad. Financial globalization, its origins and consequences, is an ongoing interest.