Desiree Abu-Odeh is a history-track PhD candidate in sociomedical sciences and predoctoral fellow in gender, sexuality, and health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. There she studies public health ethics and intermeshed histories of public health, gender, race, sexuality, and social movements in the United States. Desiree’s dissertation examines the sexual violence problem and antiviolence work on American college campuses from 1950 to 2000. Her past work on obesity and stigma has been published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.
Edwin F. Ackerman is Assistant Professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and Global History Initiative Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center. He is currently completing a book about the origins of the mass party form.
Olivier Burtin is an Incoming Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. His current book project explores the role of veterans’ groups in the growth of a separate welfare state for former soldiers and their relatives in the mid-twentieth-century United States. It was a finalist for the 2018 Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize, which recognizes the previous year’s best-written doctoral dissertation in US history. His work has been published by Routledge as well as by the Journal of Policy History, War & Society, and Reviews in American History.
Birgitta Jansson is researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her PhD is in economic history. Her research interests are in the fields of inequality, poverty, and income distribution. She is currently research director of the research project “Working but Poor: The Development of In-Work Poverty and Income Mobility in Sweden, from 1987 to 2017,” financed by Swedish Research Council for Health, Working life and Welfare (FORTE).
Shamus Khan is a professor in and chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He primarily works in the areas of cultural sociology and stratification, with a strong focus on elites. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (2011), The Practice of Research (2013, with Dana Fisher), and Approaches to Ethnography (2017, with Colin Jerolmack); and is completing The Sexual Project with Jennifer Hirsch and Exceptional: The Astors, Elite New York, and the Story of American Inequality.
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz is professor and chair of political science at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her research, which centers on gender and American politics and state-society relationships, has been published in Political Research Quarterly and Gender, Politics & Policy.
Constance A. Nathanson is a professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She has more than forty years of experience in research on sociological dimensions of health and health policy. Her recent publications include articles theorizing policy and policy change in public health from a sociological perspective, articles on tobacco and gun control policy, the role of social movements in policy change, and essays on health inequalities, as well as the book Disease Prevention as Social Change (2007).
Efe Peker is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at McGill University, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He has a joint PhD in sociology (Simon Fraser University) and history (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). His research draws on state-religion relations around the world in comparative-historical perspective, with particular expertise on Québec, France, and Turkey. He has published in journals such as Capital & Class and Socialism & Democracy, as well as the book Challenging Neoliberalism in Turkey’s Gezi Park (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Patrick Shea is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. He researches the political economy of conflict, with a focus on how finance affects war outcomes, conflict initiation, and domestic politics. His research articles appear in Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, Economics & Politics, among others.
Dan Slater is professor of political science and the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies and Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia and coauthor of Coercive Distribution. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics.
Hillel David Soifer is associate professor of political science at Temple University. He is the author of State Building in Latin America and the co-editor of Politics after Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru, as well as articles in Latin American Research Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and Studies in Comparative International Development. He continues to work on state capacity in both historical and contemporary Latin America, as well as a range of issues in the methodology of comparative historical research.
