Fellows 2019-2020

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2019-2020 fellows for the Center’s Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program.

The 15th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence in September 2019 through June 2020, 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

James Bisbee studies the domestic political economics of free trade, tracing how trade shocks translate into political preferences, voting behavior, firm strategies, and legislative policies. He uses a combination of machine learning and causal inference, applied to rich geographic data, to explore these questions. His work has appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, the American Political Science Review, and International Organizations. Prior to pursuing his PhD at NYU's Department of Politics, he received an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and worked as an analyst for the IFC and the North Korean Human Rights Database. He plays bluegrass music and squash in his free time and is slowly getting better at carving out such opportunities.

Jared Finnegan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. He studies the comparative political economy of the high-income democracies with a focus on climate change and energy policy. He is interested in how governments, firms, and voters think about and address long-term policy problems. He earned his PhD in Political Science in 2019 from the Department of Government and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His thesis, Low Carbon for the Long Term: Essays on the Comparative Political Economy of Climate Change Policy examines the role of political institutions and electoral incentives in structuring the distributional politics of long-term climate policymaking across countries. His work has appeared in the Socio-Economic Review. Before his doctoral studies he was a Research Analyst at the World Resources Institute. Jared holds an MRes in Political Science and MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the LSE and a BA in Latin American and Latino Studies and Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Gerda Hooijer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She also holds a M.Sc. in Comparative Social Policy from Oxford and a M.Sc. in Political Science from Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research interests include comparative political economy, comparative social policy, and the politics of immigration in advanced democracies. Gerda’s current research examines the effects of immigration and increased diversity on voters’ support for generous and inclusive welfare states. It draws on survey analysis and experiments. At the Niehaus Center, she will focus on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also work on ongoing collaborative projects on the politics of immigration, and the long-term political consequences of famines. Her work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies.

Elif Kalaycioglu will receive her PhD from the University of Minnesota in June 2019. Her research interests lie in world orders and global governance, with a focus on the possibilities of cooperation in a pluralizing world order. Her dissertation, “Possibilities of Global Governance: World Heritage and the Politics of Universal Value and Expertise”centers on the important but underexplored UNESCO world heritage regime to analyze the possibilities of governance in a key area of plurality in the world order, that is, culture. Kalaycioglu has a forthcoming book chapter “Governing Culture ‘Credibly:’ Contestations of Expertise at the World Heritage Regime,” in Cultural Diversity and International Order, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Andrew Phillips.  At the Niehaus Center, Kalaycioglu will work on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript to make an empirically informed theoretical contribution to the challenges of governance in a pluralizing world order. Moving forward, she will expand her research and analytical framework to other domains of governance, including environmental policy and humanitarianism.  Kalaycioglu holds a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College and an MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Francesca Parente will receive her PhD from UCLA in June 2019. Her research interests include international law, international organizations, and human rights. Francesca’s dissertation analyzes compliance with rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and focuses primarily on the domestic political incentives for non-compliance that exist in Latin America when current governments are asked to confront the human rights abuses of the past. Beyond her work on compliance, Francesca is also interested in the consequences of institutional design on state behavior; in particular, she examines the design of international laws on state responsibility and of the Inter-American system of human rights protection. Francesca received her B.A. in Classics and the interdisciplinary Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law program from the University of Virginia, where she was also an Echols Scholar.

Abigail Vaughn received her Ph.D. from U.C. San Diego in 2019. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with a particular focus on financial governance. In her dissertation, she demonstrates that central banks leverage the political ties of their home countries to induce cooperative behavior from currency swap recipients. By pairing a formal model with a new dataset that includes all swaps offered by major reserve-currency countries, she compares how the world’s largest economies—the U.S., China, and Japan—contribute to global financial stability and manage financial risks. She previously published on the United States’ use of conditional assistance to influence recipient states, while her current work examines how countries select among different methods for acquiring temporary liquidity, including reserve stockpiling, swap agreements, regional reserve pools, or IMF loans.

Mitchell Watkins is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research lies in the political economy of development and explores how foreign aid affects policy reform, electoral outcomes, and accountability in developing countries. One stream of his research examines the effect of Chinese development assistance on recipient country compliance with Western aid conditionality. Other streams of research examine the effect of foreign aid on the incidence of political cycles in expenditures and taxation in developing democracies and the impact of foreign aid on institutional trust. His future research agenda will explore the impact of elections on the subnational allocation of foreign aid.

Ryan Weldzius has research interests that lie in international and comparative political economy, focusing on the sources and distributional effects of trade and exchange rate policy. His book project builds upon his dissertation, which examined how changing trade patterns over the previous quarter century influence exchange rate politics. Ryan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis from 2018-2019.