Day One / Thursday, March 31, 2022

WorldCanvass®

MERGE, 136 S. Dubuque Street, Iowa City

WorldCanvass® is a monthly discussion program produced by International Programs. Joan Kjaer, director of communications and constituent relations for UI International Programs, engages her guests from diverse disciplines in thoughtful conversation about questions and issues of global reach and personal impact.

Live programs take place from 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. and will be presented in hybrid fashion--in person at MERGE, and also streamed on Facebook Live and accessible through Zoom. The shows are free and open to the public.

5:30 – 6:00 p.m. / Corruption

• Marina Zaloznaya, associate professor, Sociology and Political Science, University of Iowa
• Monica Prasad, professor, Sociology, Northwestern University
• Marco Garrido, associate professor, Sociology, The University of Chicago

6:00 - 6:30 p.m. / Populism

• Marko Klasnja, assistant professor, Political Science, Georgetown
• Kurt Weyland, professor, Liberal Arts, University of Texas Austin
• Caroline Tolbert, professor, Political Science, University of Iowa

6:30 – 7:00 p.m. / Future of Democracy

• Maria Popova, associate professor, Political Science, McGill University, Montreal
• Matthew Light, associate professor, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
• Bill Reisinger, professor, Political Science, University of Iowa

Day Two / Friday, April 1, 2022

Panel Discussions | Iowa City Foreign Relations Lunch and Presentation | Keynote Panel

1117 University Capitol Centre (in-person)

9:00 a.m. / WELCOMING REMARKS

9:15 – 10:45 a.m. / Session One: THE AMERICAS

• Manuel Balan
• Caroline Tolbert
• Nino Bariola
• Alex Diamond

Chair: Tom Ginsburg

Discussant: Camilo Leslie (virtual)

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / Session Two: GLOBAL TRENDS

• Marco Garrido
• Michael Levien (virtual)
• Tomás Gold
• Nicholas Wilson

Chair: Michael Sauder

Discussant: Marina Zaloznaya

TWO PROGRAM OPTIONS DURING THIS TIME:

In-person lunch and presentation / 12:30 - 1:30 pm

Iowa City Foreign Relations Council

Dr. Monica Prasad, "Can Social Science Help Solve Corruption?"

MidWestOne Bank, 102 S. Clinton Street, Iowa City

Streamed discussion on current events in Ukraine / 12:45 - 1:45 pm

• Ted Gerber (virtual), professor of Sociology, and director of the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Maria Popova (in person), Jean Monnet Chair and associate professor of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal
• Matthew Light (in person), associate professor of Criminology, University of Toronto
• Daria Kuznetsova (in person), Fulbright Foreign Student Program recipient from Ukraine; Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa

Moderator: Russ Ganim (in person)

Streamed via Zoom

2:00 - 3:30 p.m. / Session Three: PRIVATE BUSINESS AND PUBLIC CORRUPTION

• Carliss Chatman
• Joseph Yockey
• Ellen Podgor (virtual)

Chair: William Laufer

Discussant: Mihailis Diamantis

5:00 - 6:30 p.m. / KEYNOTE PANEL

• Kurt Weyland
• John Hagan
• Javier Auyero

Chair: Ajay Mehrotra

Discussant: Tom Ginsburg

Day Three / Saturday, April 2, 2022

Panel Discussions

1117 University Capitol Centre

9:15 – 10:45 a.m. / Session Four: EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

• Maria Popova
• Marko Klasnja
• Marina Zaloznaya & Bill Reisinger
• Tatiana Kostadinova (virtual)

Chair: Ron McMullen

Discussant: Matthew Light

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / Session Five: ASIA

• Juan Wang
• Chase Moon
• Manaswini Ramkumar
• Andrew Wedeman

Chair: Jennifer Glanville

Discussant: Elise Pizzi

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and Interim Director at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. He earned his Doctorate in sociology with honors from The New School for Social Research in 1997. His main areas of research, writing, and teaching are urban marginality, political ethnography, and collective violence. His research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Auyero is author or co-author of numerous award-winning books, including Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (2000), Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (2003), Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina (2007), Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (2012), Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (2009, with Débora Swistun), In Harm’s Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence (2015, with María Fernanda Berti), and The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins (2019, with Katherine Sobering). He is editor, with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, of Violence at the Urban Margins (2015), and editor of Invisible Austin: Life and Labor in an American City (2015), a collaborative research project with graduate students at the University of Texas Urban Ethnography Lab. Auyero was editor of the journal Qualitative Sociology from 2005 to 2010, and director of the Urban Ethnography Lab between 2015 and 2020. He is the current series editor of the Global and Comparative Ethnography Series at Oxford University Press.

Manuel Balán is an associate professor at the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University. Professor Balán received a law degree in Argentina, where he worked on transparency policies at the National Anti-Corruption Office. He earned a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was affiliated with the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Professor Balán is a founding member of the Réseau d’études latino-américaines de Montréal (RELAM), which was founded on the need to create a space for research and collaboration for Montreal’s Latin American community. His research addresses comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America. He is particularly interested in issues of corruption and development, corruption scandals, political competition, media and politics, transparency and anti-corruption policies, and democracy and the rule of law.

Nino Bariola is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Graduate Fellow of the Urban Ethnography Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests include food and environmental justice, gender and racial inequalities in the workplace, and political corruption. Bariola’s research appears in American Behavioral Scientist, Conservation Biology, and other academic journals and books.

Carliss Chatman is associate professor of Law at Washington and Lee University. Professor Chatman teaches an array of business law, commercial law, and ethics classes including: Contracts and Sales and Leases; Agency and Unincorporated Entities, Corporations, Business Associations, and Securities Regulation; Professional Responsibility; and a Transactional Skills Simulation course with a Mergers and Acquisitions focus that incorporates corporate law and UCC Article 9. Her scholarship interests are in the fields of corporate law, ethics, and civil procedure. Her scholarship is largely influenced by 11 years of legal practice in complex commercial litigation, mass tort litigation and the representation of small and start-up businesses in the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As a result, her scholarship is intersectional with a focus on issues at the heart of commercial litigation: the interplay of business entities, government and natural persons. Professor Chatman's work is also influenced by over two decades of service on non-profit boards and involvement with community organizations. Through leadership positions, she has developed expertise in corporate governance and non-profit regulation. She has also been instrumental in strategic planning and fundraising efforts. Professor Chatman has actively advocated on behalf of non-profit organizations at state and federal legislatures. Prior to law teaching, Professor Chatman was a commercial litigation attorney in Houston, Texas. In practice, she focused on trial law, appeals and arbitration in pharmaceutical, healthcare, mass torts, product liability, as well as oil, gas and mineral law. In addition to negotiating settlements and obtaining successful verdicts, Professor Chatman has also analyzed and drafted position statements regarding the constitutionality of statutes and the impact of statutory revisions for presentation to the Texas Legislature. Professor Chatman is a 2004 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where she was a member of the Texas Journal of Women and the Law, and served on the Student Recruitment and Orientation Committee. She received her bachelor's degree in 2001 from Duke University with honors in English.

Alex Diamond is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. His ethnographic research follows the implementation of Colombia’s landmark peace deal, analyzing how the rural village of Briceño has experienced a broader regional transition driven by related processes of state formation, the development of mining and energy megaprojects, and a coca substitution program. Alex has published academic articles in Qualitative Sociology and Contexts, as well as a number of publicly available pieces in the North American Congress on Latin America, Jacobin, El Espectador, and Colombia Reports. He also seeks to incorporate audiovisual work into his research in the form of photography and an in-production documentary film titled “An Uncomfortable Peace”. Finally, with Sneha Annavarapu, he is the co-founder and co-editor of the Ethnographic Marginalia website and co-host of its sister podcast on the New Books Network.

Marco Garrido is an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology. He earned his Bachelors of Arts from Harvard University in 2000. He then earned his Master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, before earning his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2013. Professor Garrido's work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. The project has been to connect this relationship with urban structure on the one hand and political dissensus on the other, and in so doing, Professor Garrido highlights the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics. In his book titled The Patchwork City, Marco Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a “patchwork” of classed spaces, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He then looks beyond urban fragmentation at its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are connected and thus helps us make similar connections in other cases.

Tom Ginsburg is a professor of international law and political science at the University of Chicago. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. Tom Ginsburg focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. Before entering law teaching, he served as a legal adviser at the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands, and he continues to work with numerous international development agencies and foreign governments on legal and constitutional reform. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789. His latest book, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, was written with Aziz Z. Huq, and his earlier books include Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; and Judicial Reputation (2015).

Jennifer Glanville is a professor and department chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Glanville’s recent and ongoing research contributes to two main lines of inquiry: (1) the consequences of social capital (social connections that enhance the capacity of individuals and communities to achieve goals) and (2) the sources of generalized trust (trust in strangers). Her research on the consequences of social capital has focused on a range of outcomes, including volunteering, academic achievement, oral health, self-rated health, and subjective well-being. In one current project, she is investigating the role of social capital in the immigrant-native gap in subjective well-being. Another project on the consequences of social capital investigates the role of various types of trust on self-rated health as well as differences in the consequence of social capital across high and low income countries. In a series of articles on the sources of generalized trust, she have used multiple methods to evaluate a debate concerning whether individuals learn to trust or distrust generalized others in part through ongoing social interactions in adulthood or whether experiences with known others are irrelevant to assessments of generalized trust. In a current project on the sources of generalized trust, she is assessing the role of individualism/collectivism in cross-national variation in trust. She teaches courses on social problems, community and urban sociology, sociology of education, social capital, and structural equation models.

Tomás Gold is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Kellogg Institute fellow at the University of Notre Dame. His research is focused on explaining the dynamic interactions between political parties, social movements, and civil society organizations seeking to generate both cultural and political change, with a particular interest in conservative and free-market advocacy. Tomás’ work has been published in Social Movement Studies and Latin American Politics & Society, and is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements and the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, among other venues.

John Hagan is a professor in sociology at Northwestern University. He earned his Masters from the University of Alberta in 1971, before earning his PhD in sociology from the same university in 1974. He developed an early interest in the social organization of subjective justice that is continued in his 2005 American Sociological Review article with Carla Shedd and Monique Payne on race, ethnicity, and perceptions of criminal injustice. His articles and book, Structural Criminology, present a power-control theory of crime and delinquency. Power-control theory also plays a role in his work with Holly Foster in their 2001 American Sociological Review paper on The End of Adolescence. Hagan's Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology underlined the role of poverty in crime. This theme is central to his research with Bill McCarthy on homeless youth for their book, Mean Streets. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Hagan studied the migration of American Vietnam war resisters to Canada that is described in the book Northern Passage. John Hagan is the editor of Annual Review of Law and Social Science. He co-authored with Alberto Palloni of “Death in Darfur” in Science and is co-author with Wenona Rymond-Richmond of the book, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide (Cambridge University Press 2009). Hagan's recent work has focused on the international tribunal where Slobodan Milosevic was tried. His book, Justice in the Balkans, is a social history of this tribunal. This project is further developed in Law and Society Review and Law and Social Inquiry articles with Sanja Kutnjak Ivokovic, Ron Levi and Gabrielle Ferrales. A co-authored review essay with Heather Schoenfeld on war crimes in the Balkans and Darfur appeared recently in the Annual Review of Sociology. He is the recent co-author of “Death in Darfur” in Science, “Racial Targeting of Sexual Violence in Darfur” in the American Journal of Public Health, and of “The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization” in the American Sociological Review. A paper with Gabrielle Ferrales and Guillermina Jasso on “How Law Rules: Torture, Terror and the Normative Judgments of Iraqi Judges” received the 2009 Best Article Prize from the Law and Society Association.

Marko Klašnja is an assistant professor of political science at Georgetown University, with the joint appointment in the Government Department and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining Georgetown, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and received his PhD from the Department of Politics at New York University. He currently specializes in comparative politics, political behavior, and political economy of democratic accountability. Most recently, Professor Klasjna has published his paper When do Voters Sanction Corrupt Politicians? in the Journal of Experimental Political Science.

Tatiana Kostadinova is a professor of political Science at Florida International University. Professor Kostadinova’s primary teaching area is comparative politics. At the undergraduate level, she teaches courses in Russian and Eastern European politics, electoral behavior, and research methods. Her graduate level courses include seminars on institutional choice, democratic transitions, political parties, and advanced research. Professor Kostadinova received her PhD from the Florida State University in 2000. She has been the recipient of several grants, among which the American Political Science Small Research Grant (2002) and a Fellowship Program Award from the German Marshall Fund of the United States (2003-2004). Her research and teaching interests include political institutions with a special emphasis on electoral systems and reform, East European democratic transition, and comparative public policy. Professor Kostadinova’s first book, Bulgaria 1879-1946: The Challenge of Choice (Columbia University Press), explores Bulgarian parliamentary elections, party strategies, and voter behavior. Her 2012 book, Political Corruption in Eastern Europe: Politics After Communism (Lynne Rienner) analyzes the emergence of corruption as a major obstacle to successful democratic transition. Other publications include book chapters and journal articles in American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Journal of Peace Research, European Journal of Political Research, Political Research Quarterly, Party Politics, and Europe-Asia Studies.

William Laufer is the director of the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research and the Julian Aresty Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also professor of legal studies and business ethics, sociology, and criminology. Professor Laufer graduated with the BA in Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University. He then pursued a JD at Northeastern University School of Law, followed by a PhD at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author to eighteen books studying criminology, criminal justice, and corporate compliance.

Camilo Arturo Leslie is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University and an affiliate faculty member at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. His research sits at the crossroads of economic sociology, the sociology of law, and cultural sociology, with a theoretical focus on the causes and consequences of information asymmetries. He has published, or has articles forthcoming, in Theory & Society, Social Forces, and Latin American Politics and Society. Currently, he is writing a book manuscript provisionally titled Invested: Trust and Ignorance in a Middle-Class Fraud, about the Stanford Financial Group Ponzi scheme.

Michael Levien is associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. His research falls within the fields of development sociology, political sociology, agrarian political economy and social theory. The main focus of his research has been on the drivers, consequences, and politics of land dispossession. This research has been largely ethnographic and focused on India, but has also included cross-national comparisons. Additional research interests have included the expansion of land-related corruption and criminality in post-liberalization India, and global trends in public opinion towards markets and inequality over the past three decades. His new research focuses on climate change and the politics of energy transition in fossil fuel-producing regions in the U.S.

Matthew Light is associate professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. He holds a primary appointment in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, as well as an appointment in CERES (the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies). He studies migration control, policing and criminal justice, and public and citizen security, primarily in the post-Soviet region. His book Fragile Migration Rights: Freedom of Movement in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge 2016) and several related articles analyze what forms of freedom of movement emerged in the new post-Soviet Russian state, and frames the Soviet and post-Soviet experience with migration management in comparative international perspective. Light’s recent work concerns policing and other aspects of public and citizen security in several post-Soviet countries, including Russia, Georgia, and Armenia, and examines the evolution of both public policing institutions and private provision of security in the region.

Ron McMullen is the University of Iowa’s Ambassador in Residence and teaches a variety of courses on comparative politics, diplomacy, and international politics. Ron is a former career diplomat with over 30 years of experience as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, including serving as ambassador to the State of Eritrea. He has lived, worked, or traveled in 105 countries. In Burma he worked closely with Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and pro-democracy groups. While posted in Fiji he helped prevent civil conflict after an armed takeover of parliament. He was shot at during a riot in Sri Lanka and helped train mongooses to detect heroin. He survived a voodoo curse in the Dominican Republic and took Hillary Clinton on a tour of South Africa’s Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Between foreign assignments, Ron served for three years as Visiting Professor at the Military Academy at West Point, where he taught international relations and comparative politics. He was Diplomat-In-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin 2010-2012. He has authored many scholarly works, is a three-time recipient of the State Department’s Superior Honor Award, and holds the U.S. Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal. A native of Northwood, Iowa, he earned his doctorate in political science from the University of Iowa.

Ajay K. Mehrotra is professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and an affiliated professor of history at Northwestern University. He is also currently the executive director and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation (ABF), an independent, non-profit research institute that focuses on the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law, legal institutions, and legal processes. Professor Mehrotra was a doctoral fellow at the ABF. After law school and before he embarked on his academic career, Mehrotra was an associate in the Structured Finance department of the New York offices of J.P. Morgan. Before joining the ABF and Northwestern, Mehrotra taught American legal history, federal income tax, taxation of business entities, and tax policy at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He also taught strategic tax planning at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. From 2012-15, Mehrotra served as the IU law school's associate dean for research. He was also an adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and an affiliated faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. While at Indiana University, Mehrotra received the law school’s Leon E. Wallace Teaching Award, and Indiana University’s Trustees Teaching Award. His scholarship and teaching focus on legal history, tax law, and diversity in legal education and the profession. More generally, his research explores law and political economy in historical and comparative perspective, with a particular focus on tax law and policy. He also supervises independent student research and reading in tax law and policy, structured finance, and the history of American law and political economy. He is the author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Chase Moon is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Elise Pizzi is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado in 2015. Her primary research focuses on public goods provision in developing countries, specifically the local politics of drinking water provision in rural China. Her research also addresses the role of ethnic identity and geographic conditions in natural resources governance and civil conflict. She is the recipient of a Fulbright and Foreign Language and Area Studies grants.

A former deputy prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, Professor Ellen S. Podgor teaches in the areas of white collar crime, criminal law and criminal procedure: adjudication at Stetson Law. She has previously taught other courses, such as professional responsibility, international criminal law, criminal procedure, law and sexual orientation seminar, and trial advocacy. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago before earning her JD from Indiana University at Indianapolis. She served as Stetson's inaugural associate dean of faculty development and electronic education and also served as a LeRoy Highbaugh Sr. Research Chair and presently serves as the Gary R. Trombley Family White-Collar Crime Research Professor. She is the co-author of numerous books including White Collar Crime in a Nutshell, Understanding International Criminal Law, Mastering Criminal Law, White Collar Crime Hornbook, and Mastering Criminal Procedure Vol. I and Vol. II. She has authored more than 70 law review articles and essays in the areas of computer crime, international criminal law, lawyer's ethics, criminal discovery, prosecutorial discretion, corporate criminality, and other white collar crime topics. These have been published in journals such as the Boston College Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Washington & Lee Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, and many others.

Maria Popova is Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal. She holds a BA in Spanish Literature and Government from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. She has lived and conducted research across Eastern Europe and Eurasia and its various regime incarnations—from growing up in Bulgaria before 1989, through interviewing judges and lawyers in Russia and Ukraine for dissertation research in the 2000s, to her current attempt to disentangle real from fake anti-corruption efforts in Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. Popova’s work explores the intersection of politics and law in the region, specifically the rule of law, judicial reform, political corruption, populist parties, and legal repression of dissent. Professor Popova’s book, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies (Cambridge UP, 2012), won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture. Other work appears in Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of East European Law, and Daedalus. Popova's research is broadly interdisciplinary and has made it into volumes edited by historians (Beyond Mosque, Church and State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2016) and sociologists (A Sociology of Justice in Russia, Cambridge UP, 2018).

Monica Prasad a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a 2015 Guggenheim fellow. She studied for her PhD at the University of Chicago. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Grant, and in 2011 received a Fulbright grant to study at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2010, Prasad was a committee member for the Theory Prize, awarded by the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for outstanding books and papers in the work of theory. In 2015, she was selected as one of 173 Guggenheim fellows, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation-sponsored scholarship. She has twice won the Barrington Moore Book Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, first in 2007 for her book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, and again in 2013 for The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty, as a co-winner with Michael Mann. In 2014 she was awarded the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty. This award celebrates the best book published by an ASA member in the preceding two years. Her research interests are in the areas of economic sociology, political sociology and comparative historical sociology. Her current research investigates market-oriented welfare policies in Europe and their economic consequences. She is the author of several academic works. In her 2009 book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (University of Chicago Press) she argues that countries’ different political climates and policy regimes resulted in divergent types of neoliberalism. Her 2013 book The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty (Harvard University Press), examines why the United States has significantly higher levels of poverty and inequality than other rich countries and the impact of government intervention on undermining the welfare state. Her latest book, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution (Russell Sage Foundation Press), was published in 2018. She is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Manaswini Ramkumar is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the School of International Service, American University in Washington DC. Her research concerns civil-military relations in the context of democratic erosion. She is interested in understanding how militaries of democratic states interact with and respond to undemocratic leaders. Her research has been supported by The Association for Documentary Editing and the American Political Science Association's Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs.

Michael Sauder specializes in the sociology of organizations, theory, culture, and inequality. His recent research has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly. Sauder's 2016 book with Wendy Espeland, Engines of Anxiety: Educational Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability (Russell Sage Foundation), is the culmination of an extensive project examining the unintended consequences of accountability measures on the individuals, organizations, and fields that they assess. This work has received a number of honors, including the Law School Admission Council's Shelton Prize, the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and book awards from the Midwest Sociological Society, ASA's Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section, and the ASA's Sociology of Law Section. A current research project proposes a sociological approach to the study of luck and inequality. This work develops a theoretical justification for studying luck and outlines and empirical program for creating a better understanding of both beliefs about luck and the ways in which luck influences life chances.

Caroline Tolbert is a professor and Lowell G. Battershell University Distinguished Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. She is the author/coauthor of eight books, as well as dozens of articles in scholarly journals. Her research explores voting, elections, public opinion and representation widely defined. She has contributed to many subfields including digital politics and information technology policy, voting and elections, public opinion, American state politics, direct democracy and race and politics. She is the coauthor of Why Iowa? How the Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nomination Process (2011 University of Chicago Press). Tolbert is coauthor of Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States (2004) and co-editor of Democracy in the States: Experiments in Election Reform (2003) and Citizens as Legislators: Direct Democracy in the United States (1998). She has written three books on the Internet and politics/policy, including Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity (2012), Digital Citizenship (2008) and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (2003). She is also coauthor of the American politics textbook We the People with Lowi, Ginsberg and Wier (2013, W.W. Norton). Tolbert was named a Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa for outstanding research and teaching in 2009. The award is given annually to the top professor standing for promotion to full professor throughout the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Juan Wang is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She writes about local states and law and politics with an empirical focus on China. Her research, some of which collaborative, has appeared in Governance, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of Comparative Law, Crime, Law & Social Change, The China Quarterly, Modern China, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Asian Journal of Law and Politics, and Journal of Chinese Political Science.

Andrew Wedeman is currently a professor of political science at Georgia State University, where he heads the China Studies Program. Professor Wedeman received his doctorate in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994. He has held posts as a visiting a Fulbright research professor at Taiwan National University, a visiting associate professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins Nanjing University Center for Sino-American Studies, and research professor at Beijing University. During 2016-7, he was a fellow in the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. His publications include Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China (Cornell); From Mao to Market: Rent Seeking, Local Protectionism, and Marketization in China (Cambridge); numerous articles in academic journals including: China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China; and China Review; and multiple chapters in numerous edited volumes. He is currently writing a book on China’s anti-corruption struggle entitled Hunting Tigers and Swatting Flies: Xi Jinping’s Battle with Corruption.

Kurt Weyland is Professor of Government and Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford (1991) and has conducted research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela. He is the author of Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (Pittsburgh, 1996); The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies (Princeton, 2002); Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform in Latin America (Princeton, 2007); Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin American since the Revolutions of 1848 (Cambridge, 2014); Revolution and Reaction: The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America (Cambridge, 2019); and most recently Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years (Cambridge, 2021). Moreover, he has published a number of articles about populism over the years, including a definitional piece in Comparative Politics (2001).

Nicholas Wilson is an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. He earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkley in 2012. Wilson's research focuses on the historical sociology of empires and colonialism, through the case of the English East India Trading Company's presence in South Asia. In addition, Wilson studies the methodology of interdisciplinary research, transformations in the historical category of corruption, the sociology of knowledge and morality, fiscal sociology, and the philosophy of social science. His research has been published in, among other places, The American Journal of Sociology and European Journal of Sociology.

Professor Yockey teaches Business Associations, Securities Regulation, Private Companies, and a seminar on Compliance, Ethics, and Risk Management at the University of Iowa College of Law. He is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he served as articles editor for the University of Illinois Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge John D. Tinder (retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) in Indianapolis. After clerking and practicing, he spent two years teaching as a visiting assistant professor at his alma mater. Before coming to Iowa, he practiced corporate and securities litigation at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago. Awards and professional accolades: His teaching has been recognized at the college and university level—named Iowa Law teacher of the year in 2012 and a four-time nominee for the campus-wide President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence. This year, Professor Yockey was elected to serve as the President of the University of Iowa Faculty Senate. He is also the faculty advisor to the Iowa Law Review, and a co-founder of the law school’s First-Generation Professionals (FGP) student organization (launched in 2019). Professor Yockey writes in the areas of corporate governance, organizational compliance, social enterprise, and higher education. He recently co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law, and his scholarship appears in leading law journals across the country.