Fellows 2015-2016

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2015-2016 fellows for the Center's two fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy.

The 11th 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 five 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 2015-2016 academic year will be:

Laia Balcells (Yale PhD, 2010) is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Duke University. Her research explores the determinants of political violence and civil wars, warfare dynamics during conflict, and redistribution and conflict. She has recently published at the American Political Science ReviewComparative Political StudiesJournal of Conflict ResolutionInternational Studies QuarterlyPolitics & Society, and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. She has been recipient of the APSA Luebbert Prize for Best Article in Comparative Politics and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Research grant. Before joining the political science department at Duke, she was a researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis, CSIC (Barcelona) and affiliated professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (BGSE).

James R. Hollyer is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. During the 2015-2016 academic year, I am also a visiting research fellow at the Niehaus Center on Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. My research interests include patronage and corruption, transparency, and the effects of international institutions on domestic politics. I conducted my doctoral studies in the Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University (PhD, May 2012). My work has been published in such journals as the American Political Science ReviewPolitical Analysis, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and International Studies Quarterly.

Steven Liao is a Ph.D. Candidate and a Bankard Predoctoral Fellow in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia. His research interests lie at the intersection of International Political Economy and Quantitative Methodology, with a specific focus on migration. His dissertation leverages big data from government sources and different statistical methods for causal inference to understand the influence of states and politics on temporary labor market-driven migration. Aside from the dissertation, he is collaborating on a variety of projects that span Chinese Renminbi internationalization, the political economy of international child adoption, and international trade. Some of this collaborative work is forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly.

Alwyn Lim is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California with research interests in globalization, organizations, and institutions. His research examines the moral regulation of the global economy, in which global actors attempt to shape the institutions that govern macro society-economy relationships. Currently, his research examines the convergence of state and non-state actors around the global corporate responsibility movement. He is also developing further research on globalization and early nation-state formation that examines international agreements and treaties in late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2012.

Weiyi Shi  is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research is at the intersection of international political economy and the comparative politics of authoritarian regimes. She is soon to defend a dissertation on the political economy of China's outward direct investment, where she investigates how the delegation of state objectives to firms influences the behavior of Chinese investors and China's foreign policy. Her ongoing collaboration with Tsinghua University and China Council for the Promotion of International Trade produces an annual firm-level survey that assesses key indicators of Chinese firms' internationalization and business environments in China and abroad (this effort is also joint with Boliang Zhu, an NCGG alum). After completing the fellowship at the Niehaus Center, Weiyi will begin at UCSD IR/PS as an assistant professor.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy

During the 2015-2016 academic year, the Center will welcome its eighth 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 one slot. The Center will welcome Costantino Pischedda in September.

Costantino Pischedda is professor of International Relations at the University of Miami. His research interests cover a broad range of topics at the intersection between International Relations, Security Studies and Comparative Politics: civil war dynamics, counterinsurgency, civilian victimization and terrorism, coercion theory, non-violent resistance, natural resources and conflict.
At Niehaus, he is working on a book project on inter-rebel war, explaining why and under what circumstances insurgent groups pitted against a common enemy (the government) often fight each other.

Joint NCGG and University Center for Human Values (UCHV) Fellow

Stephen Wertheim is a doctoral candidate in History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of international society and U.S. foreign relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on concepts of politics and law.

He is currently completing his dissertation, entitled Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II. It examines how American policy elites first conceived that their nation should attain political and military preeminence across the globe and retain it as long as possible, even though such an objective had previously seemed all but unthinkable and certainly un-American and anti-internationalist. Stephen has published scholarly articles in Diplomatic HistoryJournal of Global HistoryJournal of Genocide Research, and Presidential Studies Quarterly, in addition to writing for The Nation and other journalistic venues. Stephen received an MPhil from Columbia University in 2011 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.

Joint NCGG and Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP) Fellow

Rachel Stein is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include public opinion about foreign policy, the domestic politics of international conflict in democratic states, the role of culture and norms in political processes, and experimental methods. During 2015-2016, as a Visiting Scholar at both the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, she will be working on a book project examining the American culture of revenge and its effects on public support for the use of military force. A related project, demonstrating that democracies with more vengeful populations are more likely to initiate military conflicts, is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review.