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2022 Council Nominations

The APSA Nominating Committee is pleased to announce its 2022 nominees for APSA Council. Each has agreed to serve if elected.

The call for nominations was circulated among the membership, and outreach specifically to APSA committees and organized sections was conducted. The committee made its decisions after careful deliberation and consideration for the diversity of the field and the varied interests of political scientists. The candidates will be put to a vote by the full membership via electronic ballot in August. APSA also accepts nominees by petition. The deadline for submitting nominees by petition is June 6. Additional information about APSA elections, including instructions for submitting nominees by petition, is available  here.

The 2021-2022 nominating committee is Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine (chair); Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University; David Darmofal, University of South Carolina; Maureen Feeley, University of California, San Diego; Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Michigan State University; and Kevin Scott, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
APSA 2022 Council Nominees
President-Elect

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Mark E. Warren currently holds the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy at the University of British Columbia, and will transition to Professor Emeritus  as of July 1, 2022. Warren’s research focuses on contemporary democratic theory and democratic innovations. He is author of Democracy and Association (Princeton University Press, 2001), which won the Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize awarded by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, as well as the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action.  He is editor of Democracy and Trust (Cambridge University Press 1999), and co-editor of Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (Cambridge University Press 2008). Warren’s work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and Political Theory. He is currently working with an international team on a project entitled Participedia (www.participedia.net), which uses a web-based platform to collect information about democratic innovations around the world. Participedia will enable evidence-driven comparative research into this rapidly developing area of governance, and will serve as a resource for governments and democracy advocates. 

Statement of views: I am honored to be nominated to serve as a President-Elect of the APSA. A member since I was a graduate student, I’ve served on the APSA Council, chaired the Foundations of Political Theory Section, and organized APSA Annual Meeting political theory sections a number of times. I’ve been impressed with the APSA’s ability to incorporate and serve the diverse interests within political science, to grow with the discipline, to lead diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, to support excellence in teaching and research across a wide array of institutions and circumstances, and to raise the public profile and impact of political science. In addition to helping the APSA to continue to build on these strengths, we should continue to find ways of addressing urgent and ongoing existential threats to democracy, justice, and good government, as well as potentially catastrophic failures of collective action, including the climate crisis. It will be especially important to continue to our dialogue about how the APSA can serve these social and political missions while remaining an inclusive and pluralistic professional organization.
  
Vice President

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Andy Aoki is professor of political science at Augsburg University, where is also the M. Anita Gay Hawthorne Professor of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies and a senior fellow in the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship. He is currently the president of the Augsburg Faculty Senate and interim chair of the Department of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.A. in political science from the University of Oregon. He was a co-founder of the Asian Pacific American Caucus, an American Political Science Association Related Group. He has also twice been elected as president of the APSA Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, served as a member of the APSA council, and on several APSA committees. His has published work on immigration, Asian American and other ethnoracial politics, multicultural education, and popular culture and politics. His current projects include research into historical racialization of Asian immigrants to the United States, comparing that to the racialization of other groups perceived to be non-white.

Statement of views: I have been active in APSA issues for many years. Much of my efforts have been spent working with others to help the association reflect a wider range of approaches, viewpoints, and professional circumstances. I think there has been substantial progress from when I attended my first conference (when a hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans and the conference wasn’t canceled), but continued work is needed. Higher education is obviously in a time of great change; even the relative few in economically secure institutions are likely to feel this, and the growing number at financially struggling schools are experiencing it right now. It’s difficult to know what this will mean for the future of our discipline, but it’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to continue with business as usual. Having worked with junior scholars as they make the transition from grad school to the market, I’ve seen how APSA—and other political science professional associations—can become irrelevant if the job searches do not go well. Retaining relevance in this changing environment is going to be an important challenge for the association.



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Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University.  Dr. Escobar-Lemmon’s research focuses on women’s representation with an emphasis on Latin America as well as federalism, decentralization, and local governance. She is the co-author or co-editor of three Oxford University Press books including Representation: The Case of Women and Women in Presidential Cabinets: Power Players or Abundant Tokens, both with Michelle Taylor-Robinson. Most recently she published Reimagining the Judiciary: Women’s Representation on High Courts Worldwide with Valerie Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, and Miki Caul Kittilson. With data collection funded by the National Science Foundation, this project asks where and when women join a country’s highest courts.  The book sheds light on the confluence of domestic and international factors that contribute to gender-diverse judiciaries. Additionally, her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Politics & Gender, Latin American Politics & Society, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism.   She is a member of the Women & Politics Research Section and the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section, having served as an officer for the later.   


Statement of views: I am honored to be nominated.  As a scholar of representation, I am aware that barriers to the full inclusion of everyone exist, and we must work to reduce those barriers.  I believe that the quality of decisions and deliberation is greatly enhanced when a diverse and fully representative chorus of voices is at the table.  I am committed to making APSA a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone.  We must communicate our excitement and enthusiasm for our discipline so as to ensure that all anyone who wants to can see themselves as a member of our profession.  As an association we must ensure that our meetings and services provide value to all our members keeping in mind that the APSA membership comes from a wide range of institutions and contexts.     



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Brett Ashley Leeds is Radoslav Tsanoff Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University. She also serves as co-Editor of International Organization.  Leeds’s research focuses on the design and effects of international agreements (particularly military alliances), and also on connections between domestic politics and foreign policy.  Most recently, she is the co-author of Domestic Interests, Democracy, and Foreign Policy Change (Cambridge Elements in International Relations series, 2022).  In 2008, Leeds received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association, which is presented annually to a scholar in International Relations within ten years of Ph.D. who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research.  In 2019, Leeds won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes Section of APSA in recognition of scholarly contributions that have fundamentally improved the study of conflict processes. She served as President of the International Studies Association during 2017-18 and President of the Peace Science Society during 2018-19.  

Statement of Views: Disciplinary associations like APSA are crucial to the collective scholarly enterprise and yet they are facing enormous challenges as publishers adjust to new financial models, universities face budget shortfalls, and the ability to interact virtually makes travel to meetings less essential. At the same time, APSA members and their departments need the support of the association as they struggle with issues like how to respond to challenges to the value of our expertise, how to encourage and support diversity in our field to better reflect the lived experience of citizens and students, and how to adjust to new teaching realities accelerated by the pandemic. Our discipline continues to wrestle with perennial issues of how best to connect scholarship with policy and public outreach and how to integrate and support different epistemological and methodological approaches to the study of politics. My goal as APSA Vice President is to collaborate with others in leading the association in adjusting to new realities, providing support and value to members, and deepening norms of inclusive, constructive, and productive interaction. I bring significant past leadership experience in APSA, the Peace Science Society, the International Studies Association, and Rice University to the role.


Council

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Jason P. Casellas is an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2006. He specializes in American politics, with research and teaching interests in Latino politics, legislative politics, and state and local politics. He is the author of Latino Representation in State Houses and Congress (New York: Cambridge University Press.) and co-author of Governing Texas, a leading textbook in Texas government. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Samuel DuBois Cook Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University, a United States Studies Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney, and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2016, he was selected by the Spanish Embassy for the Hispanic Leader Program in Madrid. In 2023, he will be the John G. Winant Visiting Professor in American Government at the University of Oxford. His work has also appeared in many peer-reviewed journals.

Statement of views: I am honored to be nominated to serve on the executive council. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in leading some of our regional associations, and I think more collaboration with these associations to expand our reach to faculty teaching in liberal arts colleges and community colleges is essential. I am deeply committed to our discipline and want to work with other members of the council to effectively advocate for the value we bring to public discourse and policymaking. Political science has so much to offer especially in these uncertain and challenging times as threats to democracy at home and abroad challenge fundamental principles too many take for granted. As such, I believe that as a discipline we must reinvigorate the teaching of political science at the undergraduate level, and I am supportive of recent efforts by APSA leadership to rethink the undergraduate major and my experience working with Advanced Placement and College Board places me in a position to assist with this effort.  



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Pearl K. Dowe is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Political Science and African American Studies with a joint appointment between the university’s Oxford College and Emory College of Arts and Sciences.  Her most recent research focuses on African American women’s political ambition and public leadership. Her manuscript The Radical Imagination of Black Women: Ambition, Politics and Power is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her most recent publication Resisting Marginalization: Black Women's Ambition and Agency published in 2020 received the Anna Julia Cooper Best Paper Award from the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics.  Dowe's  published writing includes co-authorship of Remaking the Democratic Party: Lyndon B. Johnson as Native-Son Presidential Candidate (University of Michigan Press: 2016) and editorship of African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy Reflection in the New South (Mercer University Press, 2010). Dowe has presented widely at professional conferences and given frequent news-media interviews about American political topics. She has served on several committees for the American Political Science Association, and previously served on the executive council of the Southern Political Science Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. She currently is co-editor of the National Review of Black Politics.

Statement of views: It is an honor to be nominated to serve on the APSA Council. I have been engaged with APSA my entire academic career in which I have worked at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), a state flagship university and a private institution.  As a member of the council  I would work to ensure that APSA increases its engagement with scholars across a wide array of institutions and backgrounds. This engagement would focus on developing affordable and accessible professional development to support scholars in each phase of their academic career.  APSA’s professional development opportunities, teaching and research support should be structured to impact all scholars within the discipline.  There can no longer be a perception that APSA is only an organization for those who work at R1 institutions.  I will also promote APSA increasing its work to support and advance the value of public scholarship and scholars working to engage in political events within their communities and throughout the country and world.  My time on the Council will be focused on these issues and ensuring that all members within the organization are represented. 



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Leigh Jenco is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, having previously served in the department of political science at the National University of Singapore. She holds degrees from Bard College (BA) and the University of Chicago (MA and PhD). Her monographs—Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015)—pioneered the engagement of normative political theory with the intellectual history of modern China. Her current research focuses on how early modern Chinese intellectuals theorized the value of cultural, economic, and gendered others. She has published articles on democratic theory, late imperial and modern Chinese intellectual history, and interpretive methods in such journals as Political Theory and the American Political Science Review; most recently she co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020). She has held visiting positions at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the University of Heidelberg, and served as PI of the major grant East Asian Uses of the European Past (funded by the European Commission). She has served the profession as associate editor of the American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and Contemporary Political Theory (2010-2017), as well as on several APSA committees and workshops, and numerous editorial and advisory boards.

Statement of views: I am honored and humbled by this nomination for APSA Council. As a specialist in comparative political theory and Chinese political thought, who has spent her professional career in Asia and Europe, I hope to build on APSA’s promise to be an association to support the study of politics—not just in America, but in all the places, times, and communities where politics happens, and wherever its scholarly institutions are sited. If elected, I will draw attention to the distinctive challenges faced by higher education institutions, students, and faculty all over the world, where issues such as academic freedom, institutional funding, and gender and racial diversity do not always mimic the patterns of the US. I am also a first-generation college graduate of working-class parents, who is passionate about building opportunities for less affluent students to enter the profession and make their voice heard within it. I have supported, and as Council member hope to expand, APSA’s initiatives to support graduate students—including those studying non-Western political theory. In my teaching at the LSE, as well as editor of the APSR and other journals, I have worked to recognize the contributions of historically marginalized forms of political thought and practice. I hope to continue these efforts in my role as Council member, recognizing our duty to understand and critically engage even those forms of politics with which we may disagree.



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Susan McWilliams Barndt is Professor of Politics and Coordinator of the Program in Public Policy Analysis at Pomona College, where she has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching three times. McWilliams is the co-editor (with Jeremy Bailey) of the peer-reviewed journal American Political Thought and the American Political Thought book series at the University Press of Kansas. She is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (Lexington, 2018) and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (Oxford, 2014). McWilliams is also the editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin (Kentucky, 2017) and a co-editor of several books, including The Best Kind of College: An Insiders’ Guide to America's Small Liberal Arts Colleges (co-edited with John Seery, SUNY, 2015). For her work, McWilliams has received awards including the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies. She received her B.A. in Russian and political science from Amherst College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

Statement of views: In this moment when colleges and universities face so many pressures, both from within and from without, I am grateful to be nominated to serve on the APSA council. I have always appreciated the range of political science: that the discipline encompasses, for instance, both highly quantitative work and more literary work like my own. I am committed to maintaining that disciplinary range because I believe intellectual diversity within the profession makes us all – or at least should make us all – a little more honest, a little more humble, and a little more open-minded. I do worry about the trends I see in scholarship toward boundary-policing and hyper-specialization, and I hope that APSA can find ways to take even more advantage of the breadth within our discipline. As students of politics, we evidently do not speak just within a profession but within a public, and I am interested in working with others to discuss our role as citizen-scholars. Finally, I believe in the enduring and transformative power of undergraduate teaching – that is why I chose to work at a small liberal-arts college – and I want to ensure that APSA continues its attention to our critical role as teachers.  


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Aseem Prakash is a Professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Politics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the Founding Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series in Business and Public Policy as well as the Cambridge University Press Elements in Organizational Response to Climate Change. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Environmental Change and Society and an International Research Fellow at the Center for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford. He served as the Vice President of the International Studies Association during 2015-2016. His recent awards include the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Elinor Ostrom Career Achievement Award for “lifetime contribution to the study of science, technology, and environmental politics,” the International Studies Association’s 2019 Distinguished International Political Economy Scholar Award as well its 2018 James N. Rosenau Award for “scholar who has made the most important contributions to globalization studies” and the European Consortium for Political Research’s 2018 Regulatory Studies Development Award that recognizes a senior scholar who has made notable “contributions to the field of regulatory governance.

Statement of views: I am honored to be nominated for the APSA Council. Most societal challenges, especially the climate crisis, are not amenable to technological fixes; their political and institutional dimensions need to be carefully studied and addressed. Unfortunately, such efforts are impeded by the rise of populism, the decline in trust in institutions, and the broader erosion of democratic norms. As a discipline, we should focus on evidence-supported pathways to address these challenges and develop a communication strategy to rally experts and public opinion behind them. Academics cannot afford to lose the battle of ideas to populists. Political science plays a vital role in reclaiming the policy space for thoughtful, evidence-based, and respectful discourse. I want to focus my time and efforts on the Council to make the discipline more inclusive and explore ways in which political scientists can contribute effectively to the policy discourse. Specifically,  I would encourage the APSA to engage more with the multiple dimensions of the climate crisis so that political science is at the forefront of climate conversations and debates.  



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Bassel F. Salloukh is Associate Professor of Political Science and Head of the Politics and International Relations Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He obtained his MA and PhD (Honour List) in Political Science from McGill University, Canada, and his Honours BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Political Science from McMaster University, Canada. His main fields of specialization include Comparative Politics (Global South and Middle East), Political Theory (Philosophy of Reconciliation and Interculturalism), and International Relations (Middle East IR). Salloukh is a member of the Arab Political Science Network’s (APSN) Advisory Committee, the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Steering Committee, the American Political Science Association (APSA) MENA Politics Section’s Workshops Planning Committee, and Editor at Middle East Law and Governance. His most recent publications include the co-authored The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2015) and articles in PS: Political Science and Politics, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Perspectives, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Middle East Law and Governance. His current research focuses on a critique of power-sharing arrangements in post-colonial and postwar states, and the political economy of Lebanon’s postwar collapse.

Statement of Views: APSA has an instrumental role to play in promoting knowledge production and innovative teaching approaches in Political Science globally. I can still remember the first time I sat down with an APSA delegation visiting Beirut to discuss the challenges facing praxis and teaching of Political Science in academic institutions in the Arab world. Albeit the café where we met was later destroyed by the Beirut Port explosion of August 4, 2020, the work we started then is now firmly institutionalized in multiple forms, whether the APSA MENA Politics Section or the APSA MENA Workshops. I am especially interested in working with my APSA colleagues and pertinent sections to establish the institutional infrastructure that offers rigorous methodological and theoretical training to a new generation of political scientists from the region. The objective is to create knowledge from the region and for the region, but always in critical conversation with the debates that shape our exciting discipline across the globe. I consider APSA the bridge that connects and helps facilitate these conversations in a manner that serves its own mission and the multiple challenges we encounter as we try to advance Political Science teaching and research in the Arab world and beyond.



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Christina J. Schneider is Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego. In 2013, she was awarded the Jean Monnet Chair of the European Union. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz. Before joining UCSD, she worked at the University of Konstanz, the Max Planck Institute of Economics, Oxford University, and Princeton University. Her research focuses on the domestic politics of cooperation in international organizations, such as the European Union or international development institutions, with a focus on democratic representation. Her current research focuses on questions surrounding international cooperation and democratic resilience. Her two books are published with Cambridge University Press, and her articles appear in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of European Public Policy, and Public Choice.

Statement of views: I am deeply honored to be nominated to serve on the APSA Council. As a scholar and mentor, I have always strived to foster academic excellence, diversity and inclusion, and mutual respect within the community. If elected to the APSA Council, I would be committed to work toward strengthening the efforts of the association toward those important goals. In addition to supporting the association in building those strengths, I have long promoted research that employs diverse methods and reaches across disciplines to address major challenges such as the current existential threats to democracy and the climate crisis. I believe that the association has an important role to play in addressing those important and enduring questions by bringing to bear the diverse scholarship and expertise of its membership.  



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Erica Townsend-Bell is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University. She served as a member of APSA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, an APSA grants reviewer, and as section chair for MPSA and WPSA. She currently serves as a member of the American Political Science Review’s editorial board. She teaches courses in race and gender politics, social movements and qualitative methods, with an expertise in intersectionality, comparative equality, and Latin American politics. Her research areas focus on the politics and policy of intersectionality, comparative racial and gender politics, and the politics of inclusion. Her work has been published in a variety of academic outlets, including Political Research Quarterly, Signs, European Journal of Women and Politics, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Revista de Ciencia Política, The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, and Politics and Gender, among others.

Statement of views: It is no secret that the academic landscape is fraught, and that its challenges remain unequally distributed among the members of the discipline. Given this, the question of who disciplinary organizations serve, and how they do so, remain ever relevant. I am honored to be nominated to the APSA Council. If elected I see my role as helping the association to nuance our attention to the important questions of the moment, internal and external to the discipline. For instance, there is a growing consensus that our scholarship should be more public-facing, but what are the implications of this for the varied members of the body? How can APSA help to support scholars when, inevitably, the temerity of some to simply exist in the public sphere exposes them to vitriol? What else might the discipline do to recognize, include, and support the ever-increasing ranks of non-tenure track and contingent faculty? How can political science grow in its commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that translate to meaningful engagement and action, rather than empty rhetoric? If elected I look forward to assisting the Council in navigating these complexities.