Fellows 2013-2014

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2013-2014 fellows for the Center's three fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship ProgramPostdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy, and the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Program.

The 9th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence pursing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Center and the School of Public and International Affairs.

Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program

Through the Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, NCGG awarded six one-year research positions to a group of very talented scholars chosen from a large pool of applicants. These awards are designed to promote basic research in the areas of international and comparative political economy, international organization, global governance, and globalization. Our scholars for the 2013-2014 academic year will be:

Allison Carnegie is a PhD candidate, pursuing a joint degree in Political Science and Economics at Yale University. She holds an M.Phil. in Economics from Yale University. She will be joining the faculty at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of political science in July 2014. Her research interests include international relations, political economy, quantitative methods, and formal theory. Her book project identifies a central barrier to international cooperation, "political hold up problems," and demonstrates that international institutions can help to solve them. This observation allows her to generate new insights into several enduring puzzles in international relations including what types of cooperation problems international institutions are best suited to solve and who benefits most from participation. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, the Election Law Journal, and Political Analysis.

Austin Carson recently completed his doctorate in political science, specializing in international relations, from Ohio State University. His research analyzes the sources and consequences of information restrictions, or secrecy, in international politics. His dissertation looks at how states use secrecy to manipulate outside perceptions and control conflict escalation, specifically in the context of covert vs. overt external military interventions. He also researches information restrictions in international organizations, both the logic of their inclusion and their impact on governance outcomes. Austin has been a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University and holds an MA from Ohio State (with distinction) and BA from Michigan State (with honors). He previously worked for the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. as a research analyst in weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation from 2002-2005.

Julia Gray is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in international relations with a focus on international political economy. She received her PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MSc with distinction in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics. Her research centers on international economic relations and economic organizations in emerging markets. Her work in international political economy and international organization has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political ScienceInternational Studies QuarterlyComparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political ResearchPolitical Science Research Methods, and the Review of International Organizations. Her first book, The Company States Keep: International Economic Organizations and Investor Perceptions is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on a second manuscript that focuses on the lifespans of both functional and dysfunctional regional economic organizations.

Jeffrey Kucik is Lecturer in International Political Economy and Director of the MSc International Public Policy programme. He holds a PhD from Emory University (2010) and an MA from the University of Manchester (2005). He lectures on international organization and political economy. He joined UCL in the fall of 2010. His research explores issues in international political economy. He focuses primarily on the legal architecture of the global trade regime. His recent work seeks to explain variation in the design of preferential trade agreements as well as the distributional consequences of agreement membership. Beyond trade institutions, Jeffrey is also interested in the politics of global economic governance, the determinants of foreign investment flows and the intersection conflict and the market.

Don Leonard completed a PhD in Government at Cornell University in August 2013. His research concerns the international and comparative political economy of developing countries. It focuses on the impact of international trade and finance on development outcomes, both in Latin America and across the global south. He is particularly interested in understanding how the interaction between global forces and domestic coalitions shapes political institutions and social welfare. His dissertation examines the political origins of institutional continuity and change, identifying conditions under which international economic shocks lead to the emergence of a developmental state. Another project looks at the mechanisms by which international trade in natural resources affects the stability of democracies by altering the distributive preferences of voters. Prior to beginning his doctoral work at Cornell he served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia between 2004 and 2006.

Boliang Zhu is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Asian Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2012. His research addresses the politics of globalization and economic development in developing countries. In particular, he works on three major topics: the political economy of FDI and MNCs, globalization and domestic governance, and public opinion on economic integration. While at the Niehaus Center, he will work on a book manuscript examining the skill composition of FDI in developing countries as well as papers on corruption and public opinion towards globalization.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy

During the 2013-2014 academic year, the Center will welcome its sixth class of fellows in the regional political economy fellowship program created with the goal of developing a new generation of scholars able to analyze and make policy recommendations about the regional political economy in the Middle East, East, South, or Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. This fellowship program attracted large pool of international applicants for only two slots. The Center will welcome Nimah Mazaheri and Thomas Zeitzoff in September.

Nimah Mazaheri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University. His research and teaching interests center on comparative political economy with a focus on oil and mineral wealth and government-business relations. His primary regions of interest are the Middle East (Iran/Gulf region) and South Asia (India). His research has been published in World DevelopmentJournal of Development StudiesMiddle East JournalMiddle Eastern Studies, and Iranian Studies. In 2011, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 2010 to 2011, he worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC, conducting political economy research on natural resources, public financial management, and public goods provision in India. He received training in quantitative methodology at the University of Washington, the EITM Institutes, and ICPSR. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2011.

Thomas Zeitzoff defended his dissertation in in July of 2013. His research focuses on what motivates individuals to fight and how elites and leaders mobilize supporters in conflict. In his dissertation he explores the macro- and microfoundations of conflict, with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using experimental methods drawn from social psychology and behavioral economics, along with large-N analysis, he shows how psychological factors (emotions and exposure violence) and political constraints (international pressure) influence conflict behavior. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Journal of Conflict ResolutionElectoral StudiesConflict Management and Peace Science, and Political Psychology.

Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Program

Building on a partnership established in 2001, Oxford University and Princeton University launched a postdoctoral fellowship initiative, the Global Leaders Fellowship Program, created to enhance the capacity of developing countries in the areas of scholarship and policy.

Beginning in September 2008, up to six fellowships are to be awarded annually to promising, early-career scholars from developing countries, which will allow fellows to spend one year at Oxford and one year at Princeton pursuing post-doctoral research, with funding provided by the program to cover fellows' full living costs. At Oxford they will be based at the Global Economic Governance Programme and the Centre for International Studies within the Department of Politics and International Relations. At Princeton fellows will be based in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Global Leaders Fellowship (GLF) scholars for two-year period, FY2013-2014:

Alexander Kupatadze is a scholar with numerous years of experience in studying organized crime and corruption issues in post-Soviet Eurasia. He obtained his Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, UK (2010) and has held teaching and research positions at the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC), Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, Georgia, OSCE academy of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University, USA. His first book Organized Crime, Political Transitions and State Formation in post-Soviet Eurasia was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.

Fuzuo Wu is from China. She received her Ph.D. in International Relations from Fudan University in 2007 and plans to work on China's and India's efforts to address their energy insecurity and climate change, and their implications for international energy and climate governance.

Pichamon May Yeophantong is a Global Leaders Fellow based at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, having been previously based in the Global Economic Governance Programme, University College, Oxford. Pichamon completed her PhD and MA (First-Class Honors) in International Relations as an inaugural China Institute Scholar and Hedley Bull Scholar at the Australian National University, and has held visiting positions at Peking University and National Taiwan University, among others. Her research interests center broadly on Chinese foreign policy and history, theories of power and responsibility, and global environmental governance. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, one on China’s ‘responsibility’ in global governance and another on Chinese resource investments in mainland Southeast Asia.