Political Science
Carla Alberti
Carla is a second year graduate student from Santiago, Chile. She has a BA in Political Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Currently, Carla holds a Fulbright scholarship to pursue graduate studies in United States. She focuses on International Relations and Comparative Politics. Her main research interests are political economy, internal armed conflict, and development studies.
Jorge Alves
Jorge is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate from Salvador, Brazil. He has a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Amherst College, and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. His primary field is comparative politics. Jorge's main research interests include political economy of development, state capacity construction, federalism and intergovernmental relations focusing in Brazil and Latin America. Jorge is currently writing his dissertation focusing on the varying institutional frameworks pursued by three Brazilian states (Bahia, Minas Gerais and São Paulo) in building their healthcare systems. The dissertation’s key findings highlight the importance of state-level institutions that govern subnational intergovernmental relations, as well as linking subnational institutional design to the electoral incentives of state-level political elites. His current research is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Fulya Apaydin
Maria Angelica Bautista
Maria Angelica Bautista is a fourth-year graduate student from Bogotá, Colombia. Her main research interests are political economy and development. In particular, in her dissertation she will study the long-run consequences of repression during dictatorship in Chile and Argentina.
Kelly Bay
Erin Beck
Erin Beck is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate from Rochester, NY, with a B.A. in International Business Studies from Providence College and an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. Erin was twice awarded the Graduate Program in Development Summer Travel Fellowship, and in 2008 was awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her current research project, funded by Fulbright-Hays and Brown University's Dissertation Fellowship, focuses on rural women's participation in NGOs in Guatemala. In this project, Erin examines the factors that affect women's decisions to join and stay in particular NGOs, as well as the impact these decisions have on women's broader empowerment. Erin's research interests broadly include women's empowerment and gender politics in Latin America, the role of NGOs in developing countries, and the role of the Evangelical Church in Latin America.
Elizabeth Bennett
Lachen Chernyha
Lachen is a second-year graduate student in the department of Political Science. She has a B.A. in politics and international and global studies and an M.A. in politics from Brandeis University. Lachen is interested in the interaction between inequality, democracy, and identity. In particular, she is interested in how demands for decentralization, autonomy, and even secession emerge within the democratic context as solutions to intrastate tensions; how democratic governments, built upon the ideal of self-government and representation, respond to such demands; and what implications these demands, and the central government’s response to these demands, have for the stability and quality of democracy. Lachen has explored these topics in the Spanish context, and is now investigating the movement for autonomy in the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz.
Diego Diaz
Diego is a first year graduate student from Santiago, Chile. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Prior to initiation of his PhD studies, Diego worked as a regional consultant for UNDP in the project "Pluralizing and Extending a Network of Actors for Citizens' Democracy in Latin America." Currently, he is a Fulbright scholar and holds a fellowship from the Chilean government. His main field is comparative politics, focusing on Latin America. Particularly, he is interested in the determinants of programmatic and non-programmatic -and the several combinations in-between- institutionalization of democracy in Latin America.
Mila Dragojevic
Angelica Duran Martinez
Angelica Duran is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Brown University, from Bogota, Colombia. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University. Prior to the initiation of her Ph.D., she was a Fulbright Fellow at the United Nations Secretariat in the Department of Political Affairs. Her research interests include Latin American politics, referenda in Latin America, corruption, clientelism, and the relation between organized crime and politics. Her dissertation project explores variations in drug related violence in Colombia and Mexico and is funded by the United States Institute of Peace and the Social Science Research Council. She has coauthored "Does illegality breed violence?: Drug trafficking and state-sponsored protection rackets" with Richard Snyder in Crime, Law and Social Change (2009) and “The politics of drugs and illicit trade in the Americas” with Peter Andreas, forthcoming in Kingstone and Yashar, eds., Handbook of Latin American Politics, Routledge 2011.
Matthew Lieber
Eduardo Moncada
Eduardo Moncada is a sixth year PhD candidate. During the 2010-11 academic year he will complete his dissertation, entitled “The Politics and Business of Violence and Citizen Security”, while in residence as a Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict and Violence. His research interests include the political economy of violence, comparative political economy of development, state-business relations, and urban politics in the developing world. Eduardo’s dissertation is a comparative analysis of variation in the types of institutions that subnational governments establish in the face of violence and insecurity. His study combines cross-case and within-case analysis to execute controlled-comparisons of puzzling variation in the types of “urban security frameworks” established across and within three key Colombian cities – Bogota, Cali and Medellin – between 1988 and 2008. He finds that which local sector(s) of society are the targets of violence and the capacity and composition of local business associations together explain variation in the types of security frameworks built by local governments. His research is supported by the American Society of Criminology, Brown University’s Graduate Program in Development and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Ford Foundation / National Academy of Sciences, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays program, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Cecilia Perla
Cecilia Perla is a fifth year student in Political Science, interested in comparative politics, Latin American politics and international development. She has an MA in Political Science from Brown University, an MA in Economics of Development from the Institute of Social Studies in The Netherlands, and a BA in Economics from Universidad Catolica del Peru. Cecilia’s dissertation explores the interactions between multinational mining companies and populations living in the vicinity of the mines, hoping to understand the politics behind companies’ social responsibility programs. Her year-long fieldwork was supported by the Inter American Foundation. Cecilia has published in Economia, quarterly journal from Universidad Catolica del Peru, the Journal of Business Ethics, and has contributed with a chapter to an edited volume on comparative politics in Peru, that will be published later this year.
Francisco Resnicoff
Jazmin Sierra
Jazmin Sierra is a second year student from Argentina, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. She has a B.A. in International Studies from Torcuato Di Tella University. Jazmin's research interests are centered on the political economy of development, particularly state-business relations, industrial policy and national oil companies. Her current work focuses on multinationals from emerging countries. Last summer she received a grant from Brown's Graduate Program in Development to conduct fieldwork in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on Brazilian multinationals.
Heather Silber