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  • 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
    DissertationResilient Authoritarianism and Hegemonic Liberal Order: A New Script

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

    Michael Dobson
    DissertationNO 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
    DissertationChronopower, Democracy and the Politics of Time

    Daniel Richards
    DissertationWhere Do Social Movements Matter? Charting Movement Outcomes in Contentious Issue Fields

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

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

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

    Yichuan Zhou
    DissertationDemocratic Leadership: Equality and Hierarchy in Revolutionary Movements

    2023

    Na Fu
    DissertationNetworked 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)
    DissertationTransnational 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
    DissertationDeepening 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
    DissertationRace 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
    DissertationTransnational 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
    DissertationAmerican 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
    DissertationA 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
    DissertationMaking 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)) 

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