Helen V. Milner is delighted to announce that the 17th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence in September 2021 through June 2022, pursuing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Our incoming scholars are as follows:

NCGG Postdoctoral Fellows

Richard Clark is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. His research interests include international organizations and the domestic politics of global economic governance. Richard employs mixed methods in his work, including large-n analysis of original data, elite interviews, text analysis, and experimental research designs. His book project entitled "Better Together? How International Organizations Combat Complexity Through Cooperation" investigates the conditions under which overlapping international organizations cooperate and how such cooperation affects their policymaking. His research is published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and The Washington Post. Before pursuing his Ph.D. at Columbia, Richard received a B.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame.

Aycan Katitas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. She holds an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from College of Europe and a double major BA in Political Science and International Relations and Business Administration from Bogazici University. Her research is in the area of international political economy with an emphasis on global trade and investment. Her dissertation focuses on an understudied dimension of globalization: the ways in which elite priming influences the public’s view of international trade and foreign direct investment. Her work combines surveys with large-scale consumption and geospatial data and uses text analysis, multilevel modeling, and causal inference techniques to understand the origins of attitudes toward globalization.
 

Roza Khoban is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Stockholm University and expects to complete her Ph.D. in August 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international trade, development, and political economics. In particular, she studies the effects of globalization on political distortions, gender norms, and demand for political change. A central theme in her work is to explore how the effects of increased economic integration may differ in less developed countries with different market conditions and weaker institutions. Previously, Roza was a visiting Ph.D. Student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds an M.Sc. in Economics from Stockholm University and a B.Sc. in Political Science & Economics from Lund University.  Roza will join the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich in late spring 2022.

Junghyun Lim will receive her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in July 2021. Her research explores the effects of globalization on domestic politics, with a focus on the political impacts of international migration both in sending and receiving countries. In her dissertation, she examines how international migration flows affect nationalist backlashes and democratic backsliding in sending countries. Junghyun is also interested in studying the impacts of technological changes on local labor markets and individual political preferences. She uses a diverse set of data and methods including surveys, experiments, and computational tools, such as machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and text analysis. Her work has appeared in Electoral Studies and Democratization.
 

Anna Meyerrose’s research focuses on the ways in which aspects of the international environment both condition and also create challenges for domestic democratic institutions, with a particular emphasis on parties. Her dissertation finds that international organizations have unintentionally made democratic backsliding more likely in new democracies by simultaneously increasing executive power and limiting states’ domestic policy options, which stunts institutional development. Her current book project builds on this work to explore how other aspects of globalization contribute to democratic backsliding by further shifting policy-making decisions away from elected officials and toward unaccountable bureaucrats and technocrats. A related ongoing project explores the extent to which trade shocks drive elite-level polarization and populism in mature democracies. Anna holds a PhD in Political Science from the Ohio State University, and her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 

Hyeon-Young Ro is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include the politics of foreign direct investment, trade, global business strategy, and the intersection of security and economic activity. Hyeon-Young’s dissertation focuses on the policy preferences of domestic firms seeking protection from foreign multinational corporations in the home market. By employing formal theory and quantitative empirical methods, she finds that the industrial structures of host markets and market entry strategies of multinationals play critical roles in shaping preferences of domestic producers on foreign direct investment regulations. She has other ongoing works on trade’s progressive opponents and the effect of security alliances on cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Hyeon-Young holds an MA from Georgetown University and a BA from Korea University.

Sam van Noort is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and international political economy, with an emphasis on the domestic and international causes of democratization and democratic backsliding. Ongoing work examines the causal effect of industrialization on transitions to democracy, the conditions under which voters do and do not hold state executives electorally accountable for democratic backsliding, and the influence of the global rise of China, and the relative decline of the US, on democratization prospects in the developing world. Van Noort uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, with a somewhat greater focus on the quantitative tools of causal inference.
 

Caleb Ziolkowski is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at UCLA. He has research interests that lie in international political economy, focusing on the causes and consequences of foreign economic policy. His book project, building on his dissertation, rethinks trade and immigration policymaking, arguing that legislators’ personal preferences and firms’ interests interact to influence both legislators’ roll call votes and firms’ lobbying decisions. Other streams of research focus on the implications that legislators’ personal preferences have for representation and electoral accountability. His future research agenda includes leveraging breakthroughs in natural language processing to measure the populist content of text, enabling a close examination of the relationship between international factors like immigration and trade and the rise of populism.

Regional and Political Economy Postdoctoral Fellows

Rana B. Khoury is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her research interests include contentious politics, displacement, and international aid. Her dissertation examines the impacts of international assistance on trajectories of civilian activism in the course of the Syrian conflict. Rana has studied or conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, and uses multiple methods to answer her research questions. Her work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Middle East Law and Governance, and Forced Migration Review among other outlets. She has received support for her research from the Social Science Research Council, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation. Rana holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Political Science from American University.