Speaker Bio’s

 

Week 1

Makrukh Doctor 

Vivien Schmidt   

 

Mahrukh Doctor joined the lecturing staff in January 2006 and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is Director of Learning and Teaching/Education Lead for the Department of Politics (previously the School of Law and Politics). Previous positions include the Johns Hopkins University SAIS-Europe/Bologna Center, the Centre for Brazilian Studies, St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, University of Reading, and the World Bank. Read More

 

Vivien A. Schmidt (born 1949) is an American academic of political science and international relations. At Boston University, she is the Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration Professor of International Relations in the Pardee School of Global Studies, and Professor of Political Science. She is known for her work on political economy, policy analysis, democratic theory, and new constitutionalism. She is a 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been named a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. Read More

Week 2

Felice Freyer                   

Jennifer Kavanagh

Jonas Kaiser                     

Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber

 

 

Felice J. Freyer covers health policy and public health. She joined the Globe in 2014 after years as the medical writer for The Providence Journal, where she was awarded the “Master Reporter” award from the New England Association of Newspaper Editors. She is a board member and treasurer of the Association of Health Care Journalists. Read More

 

Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and director of the Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. Her work focuses on U.S. military interventions, including factors that influence U.S. decisions to intervene and the characteristics that make interventions more or less successful, and U.S. force posture. Read More   

 

Jonas Kaiser is an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Associate Researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, and DFG Research Fellow. His research is located at the intersection of digital and political communication. Jonas’ research interests are online extremism, public sphere theory, online misinformation, and digital methods. Read More

 

Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber was born and raised in Israel to parents of Yemenite descent. She has a Master’s degree in Communication and Journalism from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  She has worked as a journalist in Israel for several publications including: Yediot Aharonot, Shishi, Hadashot, and Hapatish newspapers, and did research for the investigative show Uvda on Channel Two. Read More

Week 3

Congressman Jim Mcgovern  

Rachael Cobb

Christina Kulich-Vamvakas

 

Jim was born and raised in the Burncoat neighborhood of Worcester. The values he learned from his friends and family are the same ones he fights for every day in Congress: fairness, decency, respect for all people, and the idea that each of us has an obligation to give back to our community. Jim’s parents, Walter and Mindy, own a small package store in Worcester, and his sisters are both public school teachers. He is married to Lisa Murray McGovern and they have two children, Patrick and Molly. Read More

Rachael V. Cobb, Ph.D. is Chair of the Political Science & Legal Studies Department at Suffolk University and Associate Professor of Political Science. Cobb specializes in U.S. elections, election administration, electoral politics, civic engagement, and political participation. In 2006, with a grant from the United States Election Assistance Commission, Cobb established the University Pollworkers Project, a nonpartisan program designed to recruit college students as poll workers. Since then, more than 1,000 students from the Greater Boston area have received training and worked as poll workers. Read More

Christina Kulich-Vamvakas is an Instructor in the Government Department at Suffolk University, where she also directs Internship programs.  She is a comparativist who is interested in the politics of democratic participation and civic engagement, with a regional focus on Europe and the US.  She is interested in how “out” groups, such as women and other underrepresented groups, fair in government, public policy, political parties, protest & political movements. Christina holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University.  She is also an alumna of the JHU School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center. Read More

Week 4

Andrew Bacevich

Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch

Andrew J. Bacevich grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. He is also co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.

 

Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science & Legal Studies Department, at Suffolk University. Michal holds a B.A. in Political Science from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is a former Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2007-9; 2012-14), and at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University (2009–2012).  Her work has been published in Perspective on Politics, Cooperation, and Conflict, European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Affairs, and Journal of International Relations and Development. Read More

Week 5

Doug Massey

Maria Toyoda

Ragini Shah

Adriana Lafaille

Dara Lind

 

Doug Massey is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, he is the current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and co-editor of the Annual Review of Sociology. Read More

 

Maria is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University in Boston. She is also a Professor of Government and a nonresident visiting researcher at the International Monetary Fund. Read More

 

Ragini Shah is a Clinical Professor of Law.  Professor Shah joined Suffolk in 2007, founding Suffolk’s first Immigration Clinic.  The Immigration Clinic represents detained immigrants and unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings focusing on cases at the intersection of criminal, family law, and immigration law.  In addition to direct representation, the Clinic has also worked with local, state, and national immigrants’ rights advocacy groups helping to publish policy papers, training manuals, and legislative proposals aimed at these intersections. Read More

 

Adriana Lafaille joined the ACLU of Massachusetts as a legal fellow in October 2012 and became a staff attorney in November 2015. She has focused on immigration detention and immigrants’ rights issues. The Massachusetts Bar Association selected her as the 2015 Access to Justice Rising Star, and Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s 2015 “Excellence in the Law” event recognized her as an “Up and Coming” lawyer. Read More

 

Dara Lind covers immigration policy for ProPublica in Washington, DC. Before coming to ProPublica, she spent five years as Vox’s immigration reporter; she remains a regular cohost of the Vox podcast “The Weeds.” She’s been covering immigration in some form since the end of the George W. Bush administration. Read More

 

 

Week 6

Sarah Binder
Julia Azari
Brian Conley  

 

I am a professor of political science at GW and a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. I study Congress, both its historical development and contemporary politics.  My recent book with Mark Spindel, The Myth of Independence, explores Congress’s relationship with the Federal Reserve (today and over the Fed’s first century). I am also an editor of and occasional contributor to The Monkey Cage, a political science blog at The Washington Post.  You can find my posts here.   Read More

Prof. Julia Azari is an Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. She holds Ph.D., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in political science from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, the politics of the American state, and qualitative research methods. Her research has been supported by the Marquette University Regular Research Grant, the Harry Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library Foundation Travel Grant, and the Harry Truman Library Institute Scholars Award. Read More

Conley received his Bachelor’s degree in History, Social Thought and Political Economy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1996, and his Master’s in U.S. History and Ph.D. in Political Science from the New School for Social Research in New York City. His principal teaching and research interests are in the fields of American electoral politics, political marketing, and public policy. Prior to coming to Suffolk, he worked in both state and national politics as a campaign manager and a strategic and organizational consultant. Read More

Week 7

Renee Landers 

Rachel Rollins

Shannon Liss-Riordan

 

Renée M. Landers is a Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School and is the Faculty Director of the school’s Health and Biomedical Law Concentration. She is on sabbatical leave for Fall 2018 and is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance in Washington, DC. President of the Boston Bar Association in 2003-2004, she was the first woman of color and the first law professor to serve in that position. She has worked in private practice and served as Deputy General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration. Read More

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins is the chief law enforcement official for Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, Massachusetts, and oversees an office of approximately 300 people handling approximately 35,000 new cases each year. She took office on Jan. 2, 2019, as Suffolk County’s 16th district attorney, the first woman to be elected to that position in Suffolk County history, and the first woman of color ever to serve as a Massachusetts district attorney. Read More

Shannon Liss-Riordan is widely recognized as one of the nation’s top plaintiffs’ class action employment lawyers. She has reshaped industries through her pioneering successes representing tipped workers, employees misclassified as independent contractors, and low wage workers who have been denied overtime, minimum wage, and other wage protections. Best Lawyers in America has called her “the reigning plaintiffs’ champion” (2013) and has said she is “probably the best known wage class action lawyer on the plaintiff side in this area, if not the entire country” (2015). Read More

Week 8

Quentin Palfrey

Esther Sperling

Dr. Gregory F. Treverton

Dr. Kathleen J. McInnis

Jen Kirby

 

Quentin has played a leadership role in voter protection programs in battleground states in numerous presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaigns over the past 15 years. He was the 2004 New Hampshire voter protection director for the Obama-Biden campaign and has been a senior advisor to numerous voter protection programs at the national level and in Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In 2018, Palfrey was the Democratic nominee for Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor.

 

Fellow at American Security Project and Center for Climate and Security
Esther Babson Sperling is a Fellow at the Center for Climate and Security and the American Security Project. She is also the Founder and current Program Manager of the first-ever Climate Security Fellowship program. Esther was previously the Program Manager of Climate Security at the American Security Project (ASP), a D.C.-based security think tank. Read More

 

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as chairman of the National Intelligence Council in January 2017. He is a senior adviser with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a professor of the practice of international relations at the University of Southern California. Earlier, he directed the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security and before that its Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center. Read More

 

Kathleen J. McInnis currently serves as an International Security Analyst for the Congressional Research Service, writing on US defense policy and strategy issues. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Prior to these positions, she was at Chatham House in London, working on NATO and transatlantic security matters. Between 2010 and 2012, she cofounded Caerus Associates, a strategic design consulting company. From 2006 to 2010, Ms. McInnis served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy), working NATO-Afghanistan matters and stability operations capability development. Read More

 

Jen Kirby is a foreign and national security reporter at Vox. She previously worked as an assistant editor at New York magazine. In 2015, she received the George Polk Award in Journalism for Magazine Reporting. She is based in New York City.

Week 9

Mark Boyer

Shareen Hertel

Daron Acemoglu

David Paleologos

Roger Fisk

Dr. Boyer is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut. Throughout his career as a scholar-teacher, he has actively sought the integration of teaching, research, and service in all his professional activities. His research agenda has recurrently allowed him to follow his own curiosity about interesting global problems and he takes great joy in his ability to reinvent himself periodically (from alliance relationships to negotiation and bargaining to environmental issues and climate change, most recently). Read More

Shareen Hertel is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed with the Human Rights Institute at UConn. Her research focuses on changes in transnational human rights advocacy, with a focus on labor and economic rights issues. Hertel has served as a consultant to foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nations agencies in the United States, Latin America, and South Asia. Read More

Daron Acemoglu is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received a BA in economics at the University of York, 1989, M.Sc. in mathematical economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics, 1990, and Ph.D. in economics at the London School of Economics in 1992. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (United States), the Science Academy (Turkey), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. Read More

David Paleologos is the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center (SUPRC), where he has worked since 2002 conducting statewide polls and bellwether survey analyses in Massachusetts and elsewhere. SUPRC presidential primary polls have predicted outcomes in many key battleground states. SUPRC’s cutting-edge survey research has gained both national and international attention for its high degree of accuracy. SUPRC results have been reported on by hundreds of major news organizations on television, radio, in print, and online. Read More

Roger Fisk is a global communications and marketing strategist who played a key behind-the-scenes role in the back-to-back electoral victories of President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Since 2012, Fisk has been applying those tools and lessons to private sector clients all over the world, from insurance companies in Asia to European cities bidding to host global sporting events, and Fortune 100 companies looking to rejuvenate their messaging culture. Read More

 

 

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