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.
2023
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))