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Mary E. Breeding is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her dissertation is entitled Clientelism and Democratic Policy Representation: Evidence from Attitudes in Bangalore, India. She collected original public opinion data of 1700 households and 40 political leaders by working with a research institute, an NGO, and a data collection agency during one year of field research in Bangalore (May 2006-2007). Her research interests include: clientelism, political representation, and international migration. Mary received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the School of Public Affairs at American University in May 2008. She has also held a Visiting Scholar post at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, India where she continues to conduct research. Indian languages: Kannada. Personal Website: meb235@georgetown.edu Jennifer Bussell received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2009. She studies comparative politics and political economy, with an emphasis on India and other large developing countries. Her dissertation, "Resisting Reform: Technological Backwardness in Political Perspective", addresses the effect of corruption on government efforts to reform public service delivery using information and communication technologies in the Indian states. This project identifies the demand for corrupt rents in competitive electoral environments as a key factor influencing political incentives for, and against, increased transparency and efficiency in provision of basic government services to citizens. She is currently extending this research to evaluate the effects of public service reforms on citizen access to services and perceptions of government, using a combination of surveys and field experiments in the Indian state of Karnataka. She has spent considerable time in India, including research in seventeen states, as well as having conducted fieldwork in South Africa and Brazil. Email: meb235@georgetown.edu Simon Chauchard. I am a PhD candidate at NYU and my main adviser is Kanchan Chandra. I am interested in ethnic politics, ethnic conflict and inter-group relations, with a focus on the social psychology of inter-group relations. My dissertation proposes to explore the general - but still vague - idea that individuals obtain "psychic benefits" from representation by a co-ethnic. By focusing on the case of mandated representation in India, this mostly empirical project asks two series of questions: 1/what are these immaterial "benefits" people get when they are represented by a member of their group? More generally speaking, what are the psychological reactions to a change in the ethnicity of those in power? 2/ Do these "psychic" effects have an actual impact on socio-economic behaviors and on patterns of relations between groups? In order to explore these questions, I plan to run a large-N survey in a series of locations across Rajasthan. I am also involved in a project on the effect of Hindu-Muslim riots on patterns of representation of the different ethnic groups. Email: chauchards@nyu.edu Rameez Handy. I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and my adviser is Prof. Erin Aeran Chung. I am interested in comparative migration and citizenship politics. My dissertation is called "Citizen or Stranger: The Political Integration of Internal Migrants in Mumbai and Kolkata." The project asks how Indian multicultural policies are practiced in local politics given the presence of migrants who are minorities. In particular, I'm interested in how parties and government agencies in each city respond to the arrival of migrants from North India. How have they interpreted and implemented the federal government's requirements to protect group rights and promote minority cultures in the face of changing demographics due to migration? I am also researching how migrants themselves integrate into local politics by conducting semi-structured interviews of migrants and NGO workers. So far, I have worked with migrant workers in slums in Dharavi and Govandi (both areas of Mumbai). Indian Languages: Hindi, Urdu Email: rameez@jhu.edu Francesca Refsum Jensenius. I am a PhD student in political science at UC Berkeley, studying comparative politics with a focus on South Asia. On a theoretical level I am interested in a wide range of topics, such as institutional choice in new democracies, the importance of institutions in authoritarian regimes, the interaction between institutions and political culture in non-western societies, power structures in politics etc. In addition to doing course work, I am currently working on a project about reservations and other types of political safeguards for underrepresented groups in India. Indian Languages: Hindi (Advanced) / Urdu (Intermediate) Email: frj@berkeley.edu Personal website: http://www.francesca.no Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner. I am a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My interests lie in the political economy of development, with a particular focus on state-civil society relations, local governance, and the provision of public goods and services. I have recently completed the first stage of a research project exploring the politics of aid and NGO-government relations in the delivery of relief and essential services following the 2004 tsunami in Tamil Nadu. The project investigates the channels--local government, traditional governance structures, and NGOs--through which different groups (women, men, and different caste communities) access services in and after a crisis. The research seeks to contribute to an understanding of both formal and informal institutions in local governance and public goods provision. Email: gabikaya@gmail.com Bethany Lacina is a doctoral candidate at the Stanford University department of political science and will be a pre-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford during the 2009-10 academic year. She is also an associated researcher of the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Her primary research interest is internal conflict and her dissertation asks how central government responses to autonomy demands within the Indian federal system influence the incidence of civil violence. For this project, she completed a year of fieldwork in India, working in New Delhi, West Bengal, and the Northeast. She has also conducted cross-national research on civil violence and is the lead author of a global dataset on the incidence of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts. Personal Website: www.stanford.edu/~blacina Email: blacina@stanford.edu Akshay Mangla. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT. My research interests are in the political economy of development, social welfare, local governance and civil society in India. My dissertation examines recent attempts by the Indian government to universalize primary education. It analyzes sub-national variation in policy implementation to explain how the state and societal groups govern the delivery of primary education. The project involves fieldwork from 2008-2010 across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. The study builds on prior research I conducted with UNICEF on child labor in the carpet industry of rural Uttar Pradesh. Indian Languages: Hindi (Fluent) Email: amangla@mit.edu Personal Website: http://web.mit.edu/polisci/students/amangla/amangla.html Mona Mehta. I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago and will join Scripps College in Claremont, California as Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations in July 2010. Her dissertation, 'Corrosive Consensus: Democracy and Everyday Ethnic Conflict in India', examines how civil society can foment ethnic conflict and undermine democracy. Her research reveals the conditions under which key constituents of liberal democracy such as a free media, the public discourses of religious gurus, social movements, election campaigns, inquiry commissions and transnational diaspora politics have become implicated in a politics of communal conflict, exclusion and violence in Gujarat. With grant support from the National Science Foundation, USA, she has conducted 18 months of intensive fieldwork in Gujarat. She has taught courses in social science theory and identity politics in South Asia at the University of Chicago. Email: mgmehta@uchicago.edu Shivaji Mukherjee. I am a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University. I have recently completed fieldwork in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh on the Maoist insurgency in India. The title of the dissertation is "Low Severity Long Duration Conflicts: The Maoist Insurgency in India." I received the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) 2007-2008 Peace Dissertation Grant for the purpose of this research. His interests lie in civil wars, ethnic politics, state formation, political economy of development and of course South Asian politics. Languages: Hindi, Bengali, Assamese thora thora. Email: shivaji.mukherjee@yale.edu Kanta Murali. I am a PhD candidate at Princeton University. My main research interest lies in the political economy of development, with a particular focus on state-business relations and the politics of market reform. My dissertation aims to explain varying patterns of private investment across Indian states in the post-liberalization period and looks at the effect of political competition on policy choices. Languages: Tamil, Hindi Email: kmurali@princeton.edu Mark Schneider. I am a PhD candidate at Columbia University. My research interests include ethnic politics, political behavior, party-voter linkages, and intra-party politics in India. The title of my dissertation is “Power to the Powerful: Candidate Selection and Candidate Quality in Indian States.” This project will use an elite survey and techniques of social network analysis to understand the comparative roles of intra-party organization and voter preferences on candidate selection. I am also involved in work on the mechanisms of ethnic voting, partisanship and party-voter linkages, and plan to begin work on new party success across Indian states shortly. Previously, I studied ethnic riots. I have conducted fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and will conduct dissertation fieldwork in Karnataka. Language(s): Hindi (Intermediate). Personal website: http://www.columbia.edu/~mas2215. Email: mas2215@columbia.edu Aqil Shah. Aqil Shah. I am a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University and a Hewlett pre-doc fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In July 2010, I will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow. My dissertation asks why some militaries exercise more institutional weight and influence in domestic politics than others. I illuminate this question through a comparative historical analysis of the trajectories of civil-military relations in Pakistan and India with Bangladesh as a secondary case. Based on a year of mainly archival research and interviews in Pakistan and India, my central contention is that differences in military professional cultures and institutional organization, dating back to the foundational period after independence, are influenced by three principal but often neglected variables: geopolitical constraints, state infrastructural power and institutional design. My research interests span the role of the military in non-democratic and transitional contexts, the interaction between institutions and ideas in domestic politics, the process of normative change and institutionalization, and South Asian politics/security issues. Languages: Urdu, Hindi and Pashto (fluent) Email: as2552@columbia.edu Neelanjan Sircar. I am a third-year PhD student at Columbia University. My research interests include ethnic politics, public goods provision, and voter behavior. I also have strong interests in formal modeling, network analysis, and political methodology. I am currently working on a project (with Milan Vaishnav) to investigate partisan effects on public school provision in Tamil Nadu. Languages: Bengali (fluent) Email: ns2303@columbia.edu Paul Staniland. I am a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently a pre-doctoral fellow in the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University. From July 2010, I will be an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. My research interests include civil war, international security, ethnic politics, and civil-military relations. My dissertation studies cohesion and fragmentation in insurgent and paramilitary groups, and is based on sub-national comparisons of armed groups within the civil wars in Kashmir, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka. I've done approximately a year of fieldwork on armed groups in those three conflicts, primarily in Belfast, Colombo, Delhi, and Srinagar. I also have projects under way on civil-military regime instability, urban insurgency, the past and future of Indian security strategy, and ethnic defection in civil wars. Indian languages: Hindi and Urdu (low-intermediate) Personal website: http://web.mit.edu/pstan/www Email: pstan@mit.edu Anjali Thomas is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics and Political Economy at New York University. My research interests include governance reforms, political institutions and parties and the political economy of development. My dissertation centers on explaining why governments create and empower elected governments at the local level. My analysis shows that the nature of internal party organization is a key factor influencing incentives for decentralization. In terms of field research, I have collected data on party organization from party records and archives in New Delhi and have done additional fieldwork in Delhi, Mumbai and southern Kerala. My past research projects relating to South Asia include an empirical study of the effect of economic growth on Hindu-Muslim violence in India which is forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research. Languages: Hindi (fluent); Malayalam (proficient) E-mail: at697@nyu.edu Maya Tudor. I am currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. My dissertation, 'Twin Births, Divergent Democracies', explores the origins of the divergent democratization paths taken by India and Pakistan upon their independence in 1947 and suggests that the different class bases of their independence movements as well as their differential party organizations are the most important explanations of that divergence. I have done a year of fieldwork in India and Pakistan and finished my dissertation as a Research Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. My research interests include democratisation and political parties in low-income settings. In addition to completing a masters in public administration, she worked in the Office of the Chief Economist at the World Bank and as a consultant to the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). Languages: Hindi and Urdu (low/intermediate). Email: mjtudor@gmail.com Milan Vaishnav. I am a PhD candidate in comparative politics at Columbia University. My dissertation is comprised of three essays examining the role of money and criminality in Indian electoral politics. My research is focused on political selection; corruption; and distributive politics in India. In addition to his work on South Asia, I am also working on a joint project on Latin American left parties with Maria Victoria Murillo and Virginia Oliveros. Prior to the PhD, Milan worked at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, DC. Email: mv2191@columbia.edu Adam Ziegfeld. I am a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. I received my PhD in political science from MIT in 2009. I am interested in parties and party systems, elections and voting behavior, and ethnic politics. My dissertation, "Rule of law and party systems: A study of regional political parties in India" looks at party system formation in the context of weak rule of law, explaining one specific aspect of the Indian party system, namely the success of regional parties. For this project, which I am currently revising into a book manuscript, I conducted fieldwork in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal and have additional fieldwork planned in Haryana. Other current projects include work on corruption and coalition politics in India. Indian Language(s): Hindi/Urdu (Intermediate) Email: adam.ziegfeld@nuffield.ox.ac.uk |