The following doctoral candidates are on the academic job market.
International Relations
Candace H. Blake-Amarante
Advisers: Andrew Nathan, Massimo Morelli, and Jack Snyder
Dissertation: Choosing an International Legal Regime: How much justice would you trade for peace?
Subfield and Research Interest: international relations and international law
Ms. Blake-Amarante's dissertation looks at the problem of civil wars and how to curb violence and achieve peace during such wars. Her main contribution is to provide a general setting that: (1) formalizes and clarifies, in a unified framework, the reasons for bargaining failure during civil wars and (2) is flexible enough to address the problems of optimally designing a criminal tribunal. In other words, given the particular conditions of a specific civil war, she can determine how changing the design of the tribunal affects the outcomes of the conflict. This is an important problem that has yet to be studied in depth. One of the dissertation's main results is that a careful choice of the legal regime might substantially reduce the problems associated with the presence of asymmetric information in civil wars. She applies these ideas to compare the relative performance of international criminal tribunals designed according to the principles of state sovereignty, human/cosmopolitan rights, and domestic tort litigation. She gives an example of a situation where the domestic tort litigation model outperforms other legal models in creating incentives for warring combatants to bargain for peace, thus lending support to a thesis proposed by Anthony D'Amato (1994) during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
She holds a B.A. in Comparative Politics from Indiana University-Bloomington, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor, and an M.Phil. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Simon Collard-Wexler
Simon Collard-Wexler's personal website.
Advisers: Page Fortna, Jack Snyder, Austin Long
Dissertation: Understanding Resistance to Foreign Occupation
Subfield: international relations and international security with a focus on foreign intervention, civil wars and insurgencies, terrorism, and arms control
Simon Collard-Wexler is a Ph.D. Candidate and a Trudeau Scholar in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University in New York City. In 2011-2012, he was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His dissertation examines violent resistance to foreign occupations. At Columbia University, he also conducted research on civil war termination with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), and undertook fieldwork in the South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo for the International Rescue Committee. Before attending Columbia, he served as strategic policy adviser on Afghanistan, policy advisor on continental defense, and senior research officer on nonproliferation at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT). Prior to joining DFAIT he worked with the International Policy Institute at King's College London, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. He received an M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and completed his undergraduate degree in Political Science at McGill University and Sciences-Po Paris. Outside work and school, Simon is a poor skier, a lousy sailor, a terrible runner, and an amateur photographer.
Andrej Tusicisny
Advisers: Jack Snyder, Donald Green, Macartan Humphreys
Dissertation: Reciprocity and Prejudice: An Experiment of Hindu-Muslim Cooperation in the Slums of Mumbai
Subfields: international relations and comparative politics
Andrej Tusicisny is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, where he specializes in international relations and comparative politics. His dissertation, titled "Reciprocity and Prejudice: An Experiment of Hindu-Muslim Cooperation in the Slums of Mumbai," develops and tests a new theory that explains intergroup cooperation and outgroup discrimination. Andrej has conducted field research in India, France, and Slovakia. His papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Peace Research and International Political Science Review, edited volumes, and academic conferences. Andrej has taught various political science courses at Columbia University, either as an independent instructor or as a teaching assistant. He has also lectured at NATO Defense College and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Political Theory
Sandipto Dasgupta
Advisers: Jean Cohen and Partha Chatterjee
Dissertation: Legalizing the Revolution: A Theory of Transformational Constitution
Research Interests: constitutional theory, modern political thought, public law, post-colonial theory, jurisprudence, comparative political theory, modern South Asia, political sociology.
Through an historical reconstruction of the Indian constitutional experience, from the colonial to the post-colonial, Legalizing the Revolution proposes a theory of transformational constitutionalism. Proposing a critique of both liberal (limited state power) and democratic (institutionalization of the popular will) constitutionalisms, transformational constitutionalism focuses on negotiating the relationship between the state and the society by seeking to constitutionalize a path to social revolution.
Sandipto is presently an instructor for the Contemporary. Civilization course under the Core Curriculum at Columbia College (from 2011 to present). He will graduate with a major in political theory and a minor in law. Sandipto received the B.A., LL.B. (Honors) from National Law School of India, and was a judicial clerk to Justice Ruma Pal at the Supreme Court of India.
Felix Gerlsbeck
Felix Gerlsbeck's personal website
Advisers: Jon Elster, Melissa Schwartzberg, Philip Kitcher
Dissertation: Experimental Democracy - Collective Intelligence for a Diverse and Complex World
Jennifer M. Hudson
Jennifer M. Hudson's personal website
Advisers: Nadia Urbinati, Jean L. Cohen, Samuel Moyn (History)
Dissertation: The Bureaucratization of Democratic Theory
Research Interests: democratic theory, modern and contemporary political thought, European politics, history of political ideas, continental philosophy, social theory
Jennifer is currently a Lindt Dissertation Fellow (2012-2013 academic year). She will graduate in the summer of 2013 with a major in political theory and minor in international relations. She held the Cordier teaching fellowship at Columbia's SIPA from 2009-2011, teaching in the Master of International Affairs program. Before joining the Political Science Department, Jennifer was a Fulbright Scholar in Freiburg, Germany. She earned a master's degree in political theory and international affairs at l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a B.A. in political science.
Timothy Waligore
Timothy Waligore's personal website
Advisers: Thomas Pogge and Jon Elster
Dissertation: Cosmopolitan Right and Historical Wrong: Kantian Theory and Reparations for Indigenous Peoples
Timothy Waligore successfully defended his dissertation, Cosmopolitan Right and Historical Wrong: Kantian Theory and Reparations for Indigenous Peoples, before a committee including Thomas Pogge (chair), Jon Elster (sponsor), Jeremy Waldron, Brian Barry, and Michael Doyle. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working under the supervisor of Jacob Levy and Catherine Lu. His research focuses on resolving claims based on historical injustice, global justice, and multicultural citizenship. His research interests include indigenous peoples, Immanuel Kant, reparations, cosmopolitanism, environmental justice, territory, and international political theory. He has previously been the Democracy and Diversity postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University (supervisor: Will Kymlicka) and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Frankfurt (supervisors: Rainer Forst and Stefan Gosepath). He has taught at Smith College, McGill University, the University of Graz in Austria, Queen's University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York.