Previous dissertation titles provide a sense of the diversity of the projects completed by doctoral students in the Politics Department. The list of titles below includes primary fields of recent graduates along with the composition of dissertation committees.

2024

Dolunay Bulut
Dissertation: Resilient Authoritarianism and Hegemonic Liberal Order: A New Script

Patrick Phillip Perizzolo Ciaschi
Dissertation: The Saved and the Damned: Nativist Care in Orbán’s Hungary

Michael Dobson
Dissertation: NO MÁS CONCESIONES: Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, Abdullah Tariki, and the Politics of Oil Conservation in the Second Quarter of the Twenty-First Century

Mykolas Gudelis
Dissertation: Chronopower, Democracy and the Politics of Time

Daniel Richards
Dissertation: Where Do Social Movements Matter? Charting Movement Outcomes in Contentious Issue Fields

Jan Smolenski
Dissertation: Constituent Power, Federal Principle, Federal Spatio-Political Imaginary: Reimagining the Democratic Federation as the Union of Unions

Theo Vasconcelos De Almeida
Dissertation: Roberto Mangabeira Unger—The Brazilian Prophet: Connecting Theory and Politics

Jackie Vimo
Dissertation: Federated Inequality: Undocumented Immigrant Rights in U.S. States Since 1994

Yichuan Zhou
Dissertation: Democratic Leadership: Equality and Hierarchy in Revolutionary Movements

2023

Na Fu
Dissertation: Networked Hands: Rethinking Flexible Production, Digital Capitalism, and the State in China’s Shoe Industry

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves
Dissertation: Freedom in Dependence: A Critical Theory of our Dependent Condition

Mariia Shynkarenko 
Dissertation: Flexible Identities, Resilient People. The Crimean Tatars' Struggle

2022

Sara Gebh
Dissertation: The Spectre of Disorder: Stasis and the Pacification of the Democratic Idea

Sara Hassani
Dissertation: Cloistered Infernos: The Politics of Self-Immolation in the Persian Belt

Paul Londrigan
Dissertation: Forgiveness Withheld: A Critique of the Sovereign Prerogative

Lucas Perello
Dissertation: The Fate of Parties under Democratic Backsliding: The Case of Honduras, 1981-2017

Macushla Robinson
Dissertation: A Received Grace: Family Heirlooms, Slavery, and the Feminine Labor of Forgetting

Noah Shuster
Dissertation: Deserting the Big-Box Store: Moral Economy and Everyday Agency in Big-Box Retail Work

Katinka Wijsman
Dissertation: Assembling Coasts: Climate Change, Resilience, and the Politics of Belonging

2021

Dechen Alberto 
Dissertation: Answering the Call? Conservative Christianity, Homosexuality and the Global Culture Wars

Benjamin Anders
Dissertation: Environmentalism and Parliamentary Democracy: A New Theory of Ecosystems and Future Human Generations as Subjects of Political Representation

Mine Yildirim
Dissertation: Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul

2020

Jong Wan Baik
Dissertation: Politics of Dualism: A Study of Active Labor Market Policies in South Korea

Yunjeong Choi
Dissertation: The Boundary Problem of the People: A Democratic Theory of Constituent Power

Nicholas George Fiori
Dissertation: The Dynamics of Whiteness: Race and the Science of Energy from the Plantation to Cybernetics

Jordanco Jovanoski
Dissertation: A Study of Dramatization in the Critical Thought of Machiavelli and Marx

Andrew John Gilardi Kuech
Dissertation: Imagining “America” in Communist and Nationalist China, 1949–1965

Michelle Day Weitzel
Dissertation: Drones, Sirens, and Prayer Calls: Unheard Consequences of a Politics of Sound

2019

Camila Cordeiro Andrade Gripp
Dissertation: New Dogs, Old Tricks: The Inner Workings of an Attempt at Police Reform in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Christopher Guy Crews
Dissertation: Social Movements and Earthbound People: Towards a New Politics of the Earth in the Anthropocene

Antonia Marie Cucchiara
Dissertation: Civis Americanus Sum: Luigi Antonini, the Italian-American Labor Council and the Movement to Reclassify Italian Alien Enemies During World War II

Geeti Das
Dissertation: From Mental Disorder to Emotional Data: The Changing Terrain of Sexual Politics

Christopher Paul Harris
Dissertation: Political Acts, Generational Minds: Race, Culture, and the Politics of the Wake

Bilal Ali Kotil
Dissertation: Humanity and Its Others: Antislavery, Islam and Humanitarianism in the Nineteenth Century

Adam B. Kozicharow
Dissertation: A Casualty of War: The End of the Draft and the Professionalization of America’s Military

Mario Marcello Pasco Dalla Porta
Dissertation: The Coercion/Dialogue Paradox in Contentious Dynamics: A Comparative Analysis of Mining-Related Conflicts in Latin American Countries

Mariana Prandini Fraga Assis
Dissertation: Women’s Human Rights as a Legal Category: Boundaries, Scales and Binaries in the Transnational Legal Sphere

John Ricky Price
Dissertation: Containing HIV/AIDS: The Viral Transformation of U.S. Public Health Policy

Veronica Alicia Zebadua Yanez
Dissertation: Projects of Freedom: Biography and Political Theory in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

2018

Kalaya Chareonying
Dissertation: The Political Construction of the Housing Finance Market from the “Great Society” to the “Ownership Society,” 1968-2008 

Jan Piotr Dutkiewicz
Dissertation: Capitalist Pigs: The Making of the Corporate Meat Animal

Chelsea R. R. Ebin
Dissertation: Remaking the American Right: Conservative Catholic and Protestant Political Coalition Building, 1968-1981

Peter Janos Galambos
Dissertation: The Method of Utopia: Critical Urbanism and the Ideal City

Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi
Dissertation: State-Islam Relations in Germany and in the U.S.: How Muslim Immigration Increases Secularization

Julian Honkasalo
Dissertation: Superfluous Lives: An Arendtian Critique of Biopolitics 

Brandon Koenig
Dissertation: The New Politics of Labor

Joseph D. Lombardo
Dissertation: In the Kingdom of Dams: Water, Governance, and the Keban Project in Eastern Anatolia, 1961-1974

William Reed Payne
Dissertation: Why We Can’t Wait: An Identity Account of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

Scott Benjamin Ritner
Dissertation: The Critical Spirit: The Pessimistic Heterodoxy of Simone Weil

Jacqueline Vimo
Dissertation: The State of Immigrant Rights: Subfederal Immigrant Politics in the United States, 1994-2016

Amanda Leigh Zadorian
Dissertation: Competing for Legitimacy: Oil Industry Governance in Russia and Brazil 

2017

Julia Patricia Carrillo Lerma
Main Field: Comparative Politics, History
Advisors: Riva Kastoryano (Sciences Po) (co-chair), Federico Finchelstein (co-chair), Olivier Dabene (Sciences Po), Mai Ngai (Columbia), Jessica Pisano, Fernando Urrea (Universidad del Valle)
Dissertation: A Colombian Diaspora: From Living and Leaving a Conflict to Engaging in Peace-building and the Rewriting of Social Memories of Violence

Paul Citrinn
Main Field: American Politics
Advisors: David Plotke (chair), Julia Ott, Jeremy Varon
Dissertation: Ending the Cold War on the Cheap: The George H. W. Bush Administration and the Issue of Western Financial Aid to Perestroika, 1989-1991   

Luis Alberto Herran Avila
Main Fields: Comparative Politics, History
Advisors: Federico Finchelstein (chair), Banu Bargu, Carlos Forment, Pablo Piccato (Columbia), Eric Zolov (Stonybrook)
Dissertation: Transnational Anticommunism: The Extreme Right and the Politics of Enmity in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, 1946-1972

Carmen Ilzarbe
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Andreas Kalyvas, Federico Finchelstein, Carlos Forment
Dissertation: Deepening Democracy? The Democratic Imaginary and the Reconfiguration of the Public Sphere in Peru, 1997 – 2006   

Blair Taylor
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Nancy Fraser (chair), James Miller, Jeremy Varon
Dissertation: From After Globalization to Occupy Wall Street: Neoanarchist Movements and the New Spirit of Capitalism   

Howell Williams
Main Field: American Politics
Advisors: Victoria Hattam (chair), Julia Ott, Ann Snitow, Deva Woodly
Dissertation: Re-Focus on the Family: The Development of a Liberal Family Politics 1980-2015

2016

Maria Kaneti
Main Fields: Comparative Politics, American Politics
Advisers: Victoria Hattam (chair), Andreas Kalyvas
Dissertation: Migrants, Rights, Politics: Political Agency in Times of Exclusion

Samuel Müller
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Nancy Fraser (chair), Banu Bargu, Eduardo Mendieta (Stony Brook University), Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
Dissertation: Undercurrents and Back Doors: Reconstructing Religion in Jürgen Habermas’s Critical Social Theory

2015

Nathan Angelo
Main Field: American Politics
Advisors: Victoria Hattam (chair), David Plotke, Deva Woodly
Dissertation: Race and Ethnicity in Presidential Campaign Rhetoric, 1964-2004

Laura Balbuena Gonzalez
Main Fields: Political Theory, Comparative Politics
Advisors: James Miller, David Plotke, Jo-Marie Burt (George Mason University)
Dissertation: When Terror has a Female Face: Gender and the Shining Path

Amando Basurto
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Andreas Kalyvas (chair), Richard Bernstein, James Miller
Dissertation: Thinking along with Hannah Arendt: A Comprehensive Study of the Concept of Thinking in Arendt's Political Thought   

Hadas Cohen
Main Fields: Political Theory, Comparative Politics
Advisors: James Miller (chair), Oz Frankel, Orly Lubin
Dissertation: Between Subversion and Treason: The Israeli Palestinian Conflict Through the Story of an Alleged Israeli Traitress

Yoav Fromer
Main Fields: American Politics, Political Theory
Advisors: James Miller (chair), Robert Boyers, Oz Frankel, David Plotke
Dissertation: Man in the Middle: The Political Imagination of John Updike and the Decline of Postwar Liberalism

Maria Cristina Gonzalez de Withrington
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Nancy Fraser (chair), Banu Bargu, Andreas Kalyvas
Dissertation: Transnational Publicity in Theory and Practice: The World Social Forum between Deliberation and Agonism

Michael Gretz
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: James Miller (chair), Banu Bargu, Eli Zaretsky
Dissertation: The Danger of Recuperation and the Lure of Antipolitics: The Political Theory of Left Communism   

Angel Jaramillo Torres
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: James Miller, Andreas Kalyvas, Bernard Flynn (Philosophy)
Dissertation: Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thrasymachean-Dionysian Socrates

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Nancy Fraser (chair), Andreas Kalyvas, McKenzie Wark
Dissertation: Whose Property? Intellectual Property and the Challenge of Political Community in a Post-Industrial Age

Gerasimos Karavitis
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Andreas Kalyvas (chair), Banu Bargu, Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia), Bruno Bosteels (Cornell)
Dissertation: A Theory of Democracy: With Badiou and Castoriadis beyond Heteronomy

Marcos Soler
Main Field: American Politics
Advisors: David Plotke (chair), Federico Finchelstein, Julia Ott, Andrew Arato
Dissertation: American Conservatism and the Idea of Democracy, 1930-1980   

Sarah Taylor
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: Mala Htun (University of New Mexico) (chair), Anne Marie Goetz (NYU), Victoria Hattam
Dissertation: A Better Peace? Including Women in Conflict Negotiations

2014

Paul Clement
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: Sanjay Ruparelia (chair), Victoria Hattam, Christopher Mitchell (NYU)
Dissertation: The Politics of Regional Integration in the Developing World: The Case of the Caribbean Community (Caricom)

Cristina Dragomir
Main Field: American Politics
Advisors: David Plotke (chair), Timothy Pachirat, Terry Williams (Sociology), Aristide Zolberg
Dissertation: Making Immigrant Soldiers

Raphael Neves
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisors: Nancy Fraser (chair), Andreas Kalyvas, Max Pensky (Binghamton)
Dissertation: Healing the Past or Causing More Evil? Amnesty and Accountability During Transitions

Lauren Paremoer
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: Courtney Jung (chair - Toronto), Mala Htun (New Mexico), David Plotke
Dissertation: Recognizing Social Rights at the Cost of Social Citizenship? A Critical Analysis of the Discourses about Equality, Social Rights and Democratic Citizenship that were used to Secure the Right to HAART in South Africa

Christos Rialas
Main Field: American Politics
Advisers: David Plotke, Howard Berliner, Andreas Kalyvas
Dissertation: Rationality and Ideology in American Political Culture: The 1997 Enactment of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program

Adrienne Stafford
Main Field: Political Theory
Advisers: David Plotke (chair), Will Milberg (Economics), Andreas Kalyvas
Dissertation: Representations of Economy in Critical Social Theory

Jennifer Terrell
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: Mala Htun (chair – New Mexico), Courtney Jung (Toronto)
Dissertation: The Reality of Rights in the Postcolonial State: Interrogating Equality, Recognition, and Land in South Africa

Meron Tesfamichael
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: Ronald Kassimir (chair – SSRC), Victoria Hattam, Rafi Youatt
Dissertation: Wiping the State Clean: The Dynamics of Diffusing Anti-Corruption Norms in Kenya

Solongo Wandan
Main Field: Comparative Politics
Advisors: David Plotke (chair), Andrew Arato (Sociology), Gabriel Negretto (CIDE, Mexico City), Wiktor Osiatynskyi, Hans Vorlaender (TUD, Germany)
Dissertation: Making New Rights: Constitutional Agenda-Setting in the Transitions of Poland (1989-1997) and South Africa (1990-1994 (1996))