Fellows 2018-2019

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2018-2019 fellows for the Center’s two fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy.

The 14th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence in September 2018 through June 2019, pursuing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the School of Public and International Affairs.

NCGG Posdoctoral Fellows

Shannon Carcelli studies the foreign policy inefficiencies that result from the legislative process. In her dissertation, she found that the process of bargaining and vote-buying, often necessary to create congressional coalitions, can cause the United States to lose its foreign aid edge to a complicated, ineffective bureaucracy. In a book project stemming from her dissertation, she is expanding the analysis to determine the role of the congressional policymaking process in trade, military basing and acquisitions, and immigration. She has a PhD from the University of California San Diego and a BA from Carleton College, in addition to three years’ experience working in the field of international development and six months’ field research interviewing foreign policy experts in Washington, DC. In fall 2019, she will join the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park as an assistant professor in the Government and Politics Department. In her free time, she likes to swim and hike, and she’s always open to suggestions for exploring New Jersey’s parks and wilderness.

Lindsay Dolan is a Niehaus fellow with research interests in international political economy and comparative politics in developing countries. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and will be an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University beginning in 2019. Her research draws on experimental and observational methods to explore the role of international organizations, foreign aid, and political accountability in the context of global changes in the distribution of wealth and power. Her most recent work investigates how international organizations formally classify developing countries and how these classifications themselves shape development and political trajectories.

Haillie Na-Kyung Lee received a PhD in Government from Georgetown University in May 2018. She graduated with honors from Princeton University with an A.B. in Politics and a certificate in East Asian studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with a special focus on international capital flows, investor-state arbitration, and state-business relations. Haillie’s dissertation draws on a novel data set of investor-state disputes to help us understand why only a subset of investors elect to enter arbitration. She holds a regional specialization in East Asia and applies her language skills and expertise in Japan and Korea across her research projects. She is currently involved in IMF-funded data projects coding financial openness and its sub-indicators for the 80 most economically consequential countries.

Gabriele Magni received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of political economy and political psychology, with a focus on immigration, inequality, and redistribution. He examines how the economic context affects views on group membership, and how these changing perceptions in turn influence preferences and behavior. His dissertation shows how economic inequality in advanced democracies intensifies competition with outgroups and makes people less generous toward immigrants, thereby favoring populist actors. Another stream of his work explores representation, with a focus on sexual identity, gender and political elites. His work combines survey analysis, experiments, and elite interviews, and has been published in the American Political Science Review and in Electoral Studies.

Marco Martini received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in February 2018. His interests lie at the intersection of international political economy, strategic bargaining, and political methodology. His research investigates how industry-specific government preferences affect bargaining and dispute behavior in international trade relations. Specifically, Marco’s research examines how bilateral preference constellations shape the degree of dispute escalation and the terms of an eventual agreement. To compile previously unavailable data on trade barriers, dispute events, and dispute outcomes, Marco draws on a variety of methods, including automated text analysis, mathematical simulations, and statistical modelling. Marco has won the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) Award 2018 for the best PhD thesis submitted at a Swiss University on a subject related to International Studies.

Quynh Nguyen is a Niehaus fellow with research interests in international political economy and public opinion. Quynh received her PhD in International Relations and International Political Economy from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). In her current work, Quynh examines drivers of the relative allocation of consumption-based environmental footprint, focusing on the implications of preferential trade agreements (PTA) and key design characteristics of PTAs for the distribution of environmental burdens among trading countries. In addition, using survey experiments, she investigates the micro-level foundations of the environment-trade nexus by examining how citizens evaluate patterns of environmental footprint allocation, how this affects their trade policy preferences, and what their attitudes and preferences concerning policies that could mitigate their country’s foreign environmental footprint are.

Andrey Tomashevskiy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis and his M.A. from New York University. His research investigates the politics of foreign direct investment, political finance, and corruption. Andrey's recent work examines bribery by multinational firms and the political economy of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). He is also interested in social science applications of statistical, machine learning and network analysis methods. His research has appeared in International Studies Quarterlythe Journal of Politics and Comparative Political Studies.

Jiakun Jack Zhang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. His research explores the political economy of trade and conflict in East Asia. His dissertation examines when and why China uses military versus economic coercion in its foreign policy disputes with economically interdependent neighbors. He also has projects on the impact of trade competition with China on domestic politics in the United States and the political economy of disengagement. Jack holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California San Diego and a B.A. from Duke University. Prior to coming to UC San Diego, he worked as a China researcher for the Eurasia Group in Washington, DC. Follow Jack on Twitter @HanFeiTzu.

Regional Political Economy Fellowship

In Song Kim is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. His research interests include International Political Economy, Formal and Quantitative Methodology. Dr. Kim's research examines firm-level political incentives to lobby for trade liberalization. He also develops methods for dimension reduction and visualization to investigate how the structure of international trade around the globe has evolved over time. He maintains two databases for social science research: LobbyView and TradeLab. His work has appeared and forthcoming in the American Political Science ReviewAnnual Review of Political ScienceInternational Studies QuarterlyPolitical AnalysisThe Journal of Politics, and The Review of International Organizations.

Robert Kubinec received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Virginia. His research advances our understanding of the role of politically-connected firms in influencing both policy and regime type in developing countries. He has developed methods to advance online survey research to cover firm-level analysis, which has helped produce new data on politically-connected firms, corruption and democratization in the Middle East. In addition, Robert is developing new measurement models that can be applied to the study of social media, legislatures and other big data sets via Bayesian inference.