Daniel Galvin is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Northwestern University.
His research focuses on the development of political institutions, political organizations, and public policy in the United States. He is the author of Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton University Press, 2010), numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and coeditor of Rethinking Political Institutions: the Art of the State (NYU Press, 2006). His current research examines the effects of organized labor’s decline on public policy, party politics, and the working poor.
Galvin has won the “Emerging Scholar Award” from the American Political Science Association’s Political Organizations and Parties section, the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching from Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, the R. Barry Farrell Teaching Award from the Department of Political Science, and was twice elected by the Northwestern student body to the Faculty Honor Roll. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Political Science department and is affiliated with the Comparative-Historical Social Science program. He is a co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary Political Parties Working Group and the American Politics Workshop.
Galvin's dissertation examined the actions undertaken by presidents to change their parties, and finds that at best only half the story is in view. The aim of his dissertation was to demonstrate the fact that some modern presidents have acted more constructively with regard to their parties than others, to consider why this might be so, and to bring presidential party building into view as a component of modern American political development whose significance and variability is clearly evident in politics today.
Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, Princeton University Press (2010).
"Wage Theft, Public Policy, and the Politics of Workers' Rights," Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series WP-15-08 (2015).
"Qualitative Methods and American Political Development" in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert Lieberman, eds. (2015).
"Presidents as Agents of Change" Presidential Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2014).
Shamira Gelbman - Political Science, University of Virginia
Project: Coalitions of the Unwilling: Insurgency and Enfranchisement in the United States and South Africa
Mentor: Elisabeth Clemens, University of Chicago
Civil RightsHuman RightsSocial IssuesAfrica
Shamira Gelbman is the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wabash College.
Gelbman's research interests include race, social movements, and democratization in the United States and South Africa.
Based on a paired comparison of the American civil rights movement and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, Gelbman's dissertation argued that state actors' responses to social movements vary with changing coalition dynamics at both the elite and mass levels. Specifically, the confluence of intra-regime conflict and labor-civil rights coalitions provides the incentives for democratic concessions that would otherwise be too politically risky for public officials who are beholden to constituencies that oppose suffrage expansion to undertake.
"Interest Groups, Twitter, and Civic Education.” in Civic Education in the Twenty-First Century: A Multidimensional Inquiry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): 273-290.
“Affirmative Action.” Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. Stephen L. Danvers (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013).
“Alien Land Laws.” Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. Stephen L. Danvers (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013).
Caroline Lee - Sociology, University of California, San Diego
Project: Compromising Natures: Moral Economies of Environmental Decision Making
American Political DevelopmentEnvironmental Policy
Caroline Lee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College.
Lee is a comparative institutional sociologist with research and teaching interests in the following areas: political sociology, social movements, economic sociology, law and society, sociology of knowledge and culture, urban and environmental sociology, and research methods. Her work is located in the broader multidisciplinary field of American political development.
Do-it-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry. (Oxford University Press, 2015)
ed. with Michael McQuarrie, and Edward T. Walke Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation. (New York: NYU Press, 2015)
"Democracy's New Discipline: Public Deliberation as Organizational Strategy." with Zachary Romano, Organization Studies 34, no. 5-6 (April 22, 2013):733-753.
"Hard Times, Hard Choices': Marketing Retrenchment as Civic Empowerment in an Era of Neoliberal Crisis." with Kelly McNulty and Sarah Shaffer, Socio-Economic Review 11, no. 1, (September 21, 2012):81-106.
Project: Scaling Down: Half a Century of Community Control in New York City's Schools, 1945–95
Mentor: Martha Biondi, Northwestern University
American Political DevelopmentCivil RightsEducationLaborUrban History
Heather Lewis is Associate Professor of Art and Design Education at the Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design.
Lewis’s teaching and research integrate the history of education, art and design, and urban development through the prism of New York City’s urban communities and their changes over time.
The community control movement in education was part of a multi-pronged movement targeting housing, employment, healthcare, policing and welfare in many of New York City's African-American, Puerto Rican, and Asian communities of the late 1960s. While the movement for community control of schools paralleled and intersected with organizing in other fields, it had a distinct trajectory and a unique set of outcomes because of the role public education is supposed to play in producing the conditions for citizen participation in democratic governance.
Spanning a half-century in New York City's school system (1945–95), Lewis interpreted the historical trajectory of multiple efforts to scale up educational reform by scaling down governance and bureaucracy. Her dissertation claimed that improvement was possible because educators and school board members in these decentralized districts were driven by a similar moral commitment to societal and school change as were the community control activists in the 1960s. Given the limitations of the school system's decentralized structure, a downturn in the local and national economy, and the continued resistance of the teachers' and principals' unions to community control, local district leaders' accomplishments in the '70s and '80s were significant. Lewis's dissertation posited that while the continuity of leadership and improvement in educational outcomes in these districts may not have been representative of the 32 community school districts created under decentralization, the districts' broader social and political contexts were not atypical. Rather than treating the two districts as idiosyncratic, her dissertation argued that other New York City community school districts with similar student populations and committed leadership could have followed a different course if there had been more effective support from the central school system, teachers' and principals' unions, elected officials and the public.
New York City’s Public Schools From Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and its Legacy (Teachers College Press, 2013).
“Future Teachers and Historical Habits of Mind: A Pedagogical Case Study.” History of Education Quarterly, 56, no. 2 (February, 2016)
“Assessment by Design: Scaling up by Thinking Small.” in Reframing Quality Assurance in Creative Disciplines (2015): 107-116.
Stephanie Muravchik - History, University of Virginia
Project: New Creatures in Christ: American Faith in an Age of Psychology
Mentor: Gary Laderman, Emory University
Social IssuesReligionSocial History
Stephanie Muravchik is Associate Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Muravchik’s research has focused on twentieth-century American religion and the way self and community have been historically constituted in the United States.
Her first book, American Protestantism in an Age of Psychology challenges the claim that psychology has been used to weaken American religion, virtue and community. It shows how major psychospiritual movements since World War II, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and The Salvation Army, innovated a practical religious psychology that nurtured participants’ faith, fellowship, and responsibility. And by fostering community and responsibility among some of America’s most disaffected citizens, psychospiritual movements helped cultivate the kind of society that bolsters our liberal democracy.
In her dissertation, Muravchik explores how after World War II, though they did not realize it, Christians began a successful project of redeeming millions of alienated Americans by fortifying pastoral care, fellowships, and evangelism with secular ideas and techniques adapted from psychology. They thereby shepherded millions of the nation's most disaffected citizens – especially the homeless, addicts, the sick, and the dying – into faith's fold. Muravchik traced their efforts and its effects in three contexts: the psychiatric training of ministers, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and The Salvation Army rehabilitation centers. She ultimately argued that the model of selfhood developed in these settings, by merging individual happiness and self-determination with transcendent and communal relationships, could support an American democratic culture in the latter half of the 20th century.
“The Cultural Contours of Parenthood: A Bibliographic Review.” Hedgehog Review 15(3) 2013: 54-61.
“‘Be the Love of God Rather than Talk About It’: Pastors Study Psychology.” History of Psychology 15(2) 2012: 145-160.
Project: The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Post industrialization and Race in South Brooklyn from 1950 to 1980
Civil RightsPolitical EconomyHousing PolicyUrban History
Suleiman Osman is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University.
He specializes in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the way urban space both shapes and is produced by culture and politics. His book Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York was published by Oxford University Press in February 2011. A history of gentrification in Brooklyn, the book explores the relationship between New York’s physical and symbolic cityscapes. Tracing the efforts of a new middle class to reinhabit and restore aging Victorian neighborhoods, Professor Osman examines how Brooklyn’s declining commercial and industrial landscapes were recast as postindustrial sites of anti-bureaucratic authenticity.
Professor Osman is also pursuing a broader project that looks at 1970s’ urban politics and culture. His recent chapter, "The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman’s Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, offers an analysis of the “neighborhood movement” of the 1970s and traces the widespread and eclectic revolts against urban growth politics in New York, Boston and other cities in the 1970s.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Julia Ott - History, Yale University
Project: When Wall Street Met Main Street: the Quest for an Investors' Democracy and the Emergence of the American Retail Investor, 1900–1930
Mentor: Meg Jacobs, Princeton University
ConservatismEconomic PolicyPolitical Economy
Julia Ott is Assistant Professor of History at the New School&apos;s Eugene Lang College.
Ott's interests include 20th century American history, financial and business history, political conservatism, consumer culture, and women's and gender history.
Given the depths of populist and progressive hostility toward Wall Street in the decades before the World War I, few could have predicted that the nation's stock and bond markets would emerge as icons of a new era of permanent prosperity, even before the late 1920s stock market boom. Roughly 30 million Americans acquired federal war bonds, while the number of corporate shareholders likely increased fivefold in the 1920s. Ott's dissertation explained these transformations in political attitude and social practice by relating an intertwined history of investors and investorism. By analyzing the marketing of stocks and bonds by the federal government, corporations, and the financial industry, as well as new investorist theories of political economy formulated by a range of economic thinkers, her study revealed the early twentieth century origins of the idea of an ownership society in American political culture. Without the ideological validation considered in this dissertation, the United States would have never developed its first broad, national, impersonal market for financial securities in the 1920s.
When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy, (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Stephen Porter - History, University of Chicago
Project: Defining Public Responsibility in a Global Age: Refugee Resettlement in the U.S., 1933 to 1980
Mentor: Akira Iriye, Harvard University
Foreign PolicyHuman RightsInternational HistorySocial History
Stephen Porter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.
Steve Porter explores the intersection of humanitarianism and extensions of U.S. power over the long twentieth century. He has considered these issues in his book, Benevolent Empire? U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed(University of Pennsylvania Press, Oct. 2016), as well as through shorter publications and professional presentations. Central to his research interests are changing conceptions of ethical responsibilities and rights as well as the ways in which a panoply of state and non-state actors have collaborated – productively and otherwise – in innovative strategies to managing refugee crises and other humanitarian dilemmas wrought by war, persecution, upheaval, and other disruptive phenomena so emblematic of the modern world order. These efforts include both international aid initiatives on behalf of vulnerable populations abroad and domestic programs to systematically resettle select groups of political refugees admitted to the U.S.
At the University of Cincinnati, he has served as director of the International Human Rights Certificate, chair of the Tolley Scholarship in International Human Rights, and chair of the Taft Center’s Human Rights Research Group. He is a former fellow of the Institute for Historical Studies. He has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago.
Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World's Dispossessed. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
“Humanitarian Diplomacy after World War II: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.” in Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy. (Oxford University Press, 2015).