Social Science Research Council

Andrew Apter
2007 DPDF Research Director
Black Atlantic Studies

Andrew Apter holds joint appointments in the departments of history and anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles where he is also chair of the M.A. Program in African Studies.  Professor Apter received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 1987 and taught in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago before joining UCLA in 2003.  His regional specialties are West Africa (Yoruba, Nigeria), the African Diaspora, especially with regards to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and he specializes in the history of anthropology and social theory.  Professor Apter is the author of Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago, 1992), and most recently The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, 2005).  He is currently working on historical memory in the Black Atlantic.

Percy C. Hintzen
2007 DPDF Research Director
Black Atlantic Studies

Percy C. Hintzen is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Hintzen received his Ph.D. in political sociology and comparative social change from Yale University in 1981.  He has taught at Yale as well as the University of Guyana.  At Berkeley, Professor Hintzen teaches postcolonial studies, Caribbean political economy, and diaspora studies; his research interests include Creole nationalism and Black diasporic identity in the United States.  Professor Hintzen is the author of Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (Routledge, 2003) and West Indians in the West: Self Representations in a Migrant Community (NYU, 2001).

John R. Bowen
2007 DPDF Research Director
Rethinking Europe

John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University.  Professor Bowen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1984.  He has taught at Harvard University and Wellesley College, and has been a research director of the French CNRS, Southeast Asian Research Institute in Marseille.  Professor Bowen has worked on a range of topics, including comparative Islamic studies, political theory and cultural pluralism, and religion and ritual.  His early emphasis on Indonesia and Southeast Asia has given way to more recent work on France and Western Europe.  Professor Bowen is the author of numerous articles and several books, including most recently Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007) and Religions in Practice: An Approach to the Anthropology of Religion (Allyn & Bacon, 2004).

Rogers Brubaker
2007 DPDF Research Director
Rethinking Europe

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Professor Brubaker received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990.  He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000).  A specialist in social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity, Professor Brubaker is a recurring visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University in Budapest.  Professor Brubaker’s several books include Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton, 2006) and Ethnicity without Groups (Harvard, 2004).

Jonathan Rodden
2007 DPDF Research Director
The Political Economy of Redistribution

Jonathan Rodden is Ford International Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Michigan Institute of Technology, and currently a Fellow in the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  Professor Rodden, who received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2000, researches and teaches on the political economy of institutions; his interests include federalism, fiscal decentralization, inequality, redistribution, modes of political representation, as well as economic and political geography, emphasizing American and European politics.  With Professor Erik Wibbels, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, “States, Rates, and the Fates of Federations: Regional Politics and Fiscal Policy around the World.”  Professor Rodden, the author of numerous articles and chapters, has recently published Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism (Cambridge, 2006).

Erik Wibbels
2007 DPDF Research Director
The Political Economy of Redistribution

Erik Wibbels is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and Faculty Associate at the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies.  Professor Wibbels received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 2000.  He specializes in comparative political economy with an emphasis on the politics of market reform in Latin America.  Other areas of interest include political parties, federalism, and statistical methods, and he has conducted field research in Argentina and Mexico.  With Professor Jonathan Rodden, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, “States, Rates, and the Fates of Federations: Regional Politics and Fiscal Policy around the World.”  Professor Wibbels is the author of Federalism and the Market: Intergovernmental Conflict and Economic Reform in the Developing World (Cambridge, 2005).

Anne Higonnet
2007 DPDF Research Director
Visual Culture

Anne Higonnet is Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University.  Professor Higonnet received her Ph.D. in 1988 from Yale University, where she later taught, and she was Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College until 2001.  Professor Higonnet specializes in nineteenth-century arts and the history of art history, and also teaches museum studies and collecting.  Professor Higonnet is the author of several books, including Pictures of Innocence: the History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, 1998) and Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women (Cambridge, Mass, 1992); she is editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of the History of Childhood (MacMillan, 2004), and has recently finished a history of personal collections museums. 

Vanessa R. Schwartz
2007 DPDF Research Director
Visual Culture

Vanessa R. Schwartz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California where she holds joint appointments in critical studies, French and Italian, and art history and where she is the founding director of USC’s graduate certificate in visual studies.  Professor Schwartz received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and has taught at American University in Washington, D.C.  Professor Schwartz specializes in modern visual culture, urban studies and cinematic studies, with emphasis on the emergence of film in fin de siècle Paris.  She is the author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), and her new  book,“It’s So French!” Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Post-war Cosmopolitan Film (Chicago, forthcoming 2007) examines post-war French-American political relations through the film industry.

Steven C. Caton
2007 DPDF Research Director
Water Sustainability 

Steven C. Caton is Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.  Professor Caton received a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1984.  He has taught at The New School for Social Research and the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Professor Caton’s varied research interests include linguistics, cultural studies, gender, Yemeni poetics and politics, as well as the U.S. men’s movement, and he has published numerous articles and several books on these subjects, including Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (Hill & Wang, 2005).  He currently works in the field of water politics in Yemen.

Benjamin S. Orlove
2007 DPDF Research Director
Water Sustainability

Benjamin S. Orlove is Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis and holds an adjunct appointment as Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and International Research Institute for Climate Prediction.  Professor Orlove received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975.  His expertise is the sociocultural dimensions of climate and climate variation, especially with regards to El Niño events.  His research interests include traditional forms of forecasting among peasant and indigenous peoples, the use of forecasts in modern societies; and the influence of globalization on current responses to climate variability.  He is the author numerous articles on these topics as well as Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca (Berkeley, 2002).