Social Science Research Council

Marc Edelman
2009 DPDF Research Director
Critical Agrarian Studies

Marc Edelman holds a joint appointment as Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Professor Edelman received his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1985. Prior to joining the CUNY faculty in 1994, Professor Edelman served on the faculty at Yale University (1987-94) and was Research Director of the North America Congress on Latin America (1985-87). His research interests include agrarian issues, social movements, and a variety of Latin American topics. Professor Edelman is the author of The Logic of the Latifundio: The Large Estates of Northwestern Costa Rica since the Late Nineteenth Century (1992) and Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (1999), as well as a co-editor of Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization (2008). His work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Wendy Wolford
2009 DPDF Research Director
Critical Agrarian Studies

Wendy Wolford is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Wolford received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. Professor Wolford is the co-author of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (2003). Her second book, This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and Sugarcane in the Brazilian Northeast, is scheduled for publication in 2009 with Duke University Press. Professor Wolford’s research interests include the political economy of development, agrarian studies, social movements, political ecology, land tenure, and social and economic geography. She is currently working primarily in Brazil, Ecuador and the United States. Her interests emerged after volunteering in 1993 with a grassroots social movement in rural Brazil called the Movement of Rural Landless Workers.

Elizabeth Lunbeck
2009 DPDF Research Director
Cultures and Histories of the Human Sciences

Elizabeth Lunbeck is Nelson Tyrone, Jr. Chair of American History, Chair, Department of History, and Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University. Professor Lunbeck received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 1984. Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt, she served on the faculty at Princeton University for18 years (1988-2006) and was Master of Forbes College (2004-06). Professor Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe and her research interests include, women and gender, intellectual and cultural history, and the twentieth-century United States. She was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the History of Women in Science Prize for her book, The Psychiatric Persuasion:  Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (1994, 1996) and she is currently working on her newest book, The Americanization of Narcissism. He research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.

Emily Martin
2009 DPDF Research Director
Cultures and Histories of the Human Sciences

Emily Martin is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Professor Martin received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1971. Her major research interests include anthropology of science and medicine, gender, money and other measures of value, the ethnography of work, China and the U.S.. Before joining the faculty at New York University, Professor Martin held appointments at the University of California, Irvine, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University. She is the author of numerous books including The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (1987), Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (1994), and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (2007). Professor Martin was awarded the Faculty Award for teaching and mentoring graduate students by the Graduate Student Council of New York University in 2007.

Martin Jay
2009 DPDF Research Director
Empires of Vision

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Jay received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 1971. His teaching interests include European intellectual history, visual culture, and critical theory and his current research in on lying in politics. He is the author of numerous books and publications, including The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50 (1973), Cultural Semantics: Keywords of the Age (1998), and Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (2004). Professor Jay serves on the editorial board of Theory and Society, Cultural Critique, and has a regular column in Salmagundi. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies among many others.

Sumathi Ramaswamy
2009 DPDF Research Director
Empires of Vision

Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University. Professor Ramaswamy received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. Prior to joining the faculty to Duke University, Professor Ramaswamy held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and was Program Officer of Education, Arts and Culture for The Ford Foundation, India. Her research and teaching interests include colonial and modern South Asian history, South Asian anthropology, Tamil studies, the British Empire, gender studies, cultural studies, history of cartography, and visual studies. She is the author of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (1997), The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2007), and The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2009). Professor Ramaswamy has received research support from a variety of sources including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The American Institute of Indian Studies, and The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Ben Ross Schneider
2009 DPDF Research Director
Revitalizing Development Studies

Ben Ross Schneider is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 2008-09. Professor Schneider received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching interests fall within the general fields of comparative politics, political economy, and Latin American politics. Professor Schneider’s books include Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Counties (2003) and Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America (2004). He also has written on topics such as economic reform, democratization, technocracy, the developmental state, inequality, and corporate governance.

Andrew Schrank
2009 DPDF Research Director
Revitalizing Development Studies

Andrew Schrank is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. Professor Schrank received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2000. His research interests include the organization, performance, and regulation of industry. Professor Schrank’s articles have appeared in a number of journals including the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Politics, Social Forces, and World Development. He has also served as a consulting editor or board member at the American Journal of Sociology, Politics and Society, and Latin American Politics and Society and consulted for the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America, Inter-American Development Bank, and Japanese External Trade Organization. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, among others.

Ivan Ermakoff
2009 DPDF Research Director
State Violence

Ivan Ermakoff is the author of Ruling Oneself Out. A Theory of Collective Abdications (2008).  An Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his research interests have been centered on decision theory, regime breakdowns, political transitions, state violence, normative shifts and group processes in situations of challenge and uncertainty. Whether the focus is on matrimonial norms among nobles in the Middle Ages (American Sociological Review, 1997), parliamentary decisions in contemporary European history (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2001) and, more recently, the persecution of Jews by French police officers during the Second World War, he has been investigating collective situations in which individuals are confronted with decisions that challenge their sense of self-interest, preservation or identity. His work on the involvement of the French police in anti-Semitic persecution has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He has been awarded a Vilas Associate Award for his research by the University of Wisconsin.

Stathis Kalyvas
2009 DPDF Research Director
State Violence

Stathis Kalyvas is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University. Professor Kalyvas received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1993. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale University, Professor Kalyvas held positions at the University of Chicago, New York University and Ohio State University. His current research focuses on the dynamics of civil war. He is the author of The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006), which was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book on government, politics, or international affairs, the Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the European Academy of Sociology Book Award. Professor Kalyvas’ work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Peace Institute, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy.