Global / Transnational

Research Interest

Ben Harper

Undergraduate Student
Political Science
Music

Ben Harper is a senior pursuing a B.A. in Political Science and Music. His academic interests include early to modern political theory and comparative political economy. Since January 2020, he has served as a research assistant to Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus David Collier, assisting with writing, editing, and researching scholarly work on the critical junctures methodology in Political Science. He is currently conducting research on contemporary populism and globalization using this framework. He has also interned at the Oakland Mayor’s Office, where he conducted research on policies...

Luis Hassan Gallardo

Undergraduate Student
Political Science
Ethnic Studies

Luis Hassan Gallardo is a senior from Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Political Science and Ethnic Studies. He is interested in how his fields of study intersect with issues of international affairs and migration policy. Luis is also currently working with Sociology Professor Cybelle Fox to conduct historical analyses of the United States Sanctuary Movement and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative to map immigrant health and legal clinics in California. After graduation, he hopes to continue his work on immigration advocacy, policy, and research before applying to law school....

Oren Samet

Graduate Student
Political Science

Oren Samet is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics and comparative democratization, with a particular focus on political transitions, parties, and elections in Southeast Asia. Before coming to Berkeley, he worked in various roles for non-governmental organizations in Thailand, including as Research and Advocacy Director for ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, a network of regional legislators. He previously worked as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie...

Emily Fjaellen Thompson

Graduate Student
Anthropology

Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her bachelor's degree in Latin American and Latino/a Studies from Vassar College, where she was awarded the Burnam Fellowship for work on the U.S.-Mexico border with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum and the Cornelisen Fellowship for extended fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes. She received her master's degree from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she was granted FLAS awards to study Quechua in New York City and...

Ishana Ratan

Graduate Student
Political Science

Ishana Ratan is a third year graduate student in the Political Science Department at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, with a focus on international political economy. Her current research interests include the politics of renewable energy technology policy adoption in middle income countries. She also serves as a Project Director at the Berkeley APEC Study Center, Prior to pursuing graduate studies, she worked as an international trade paralegal, which greatly inspired her interest in trade, technology, and strategic competition in the global marketplace.

Ratan is a recipient...

Matthew Kovac

Graduate Student
History

Matthew Kovac is PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the Irish republican movement, decolonization, and the Global Cold War.

Kovac is the recipient of the 2021 IIS Pre-Dissertation Research Grant.

Blaze Joel

Graduate Student
History

Blaze Joel is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on nationalism, memory, violence, and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. He studies these issues in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country, as well as in an international, trans-European framework. He also studies the Cold War in a global perspective.

Joel is a recipient of the 2021 IIS...

Scott Straus

Professor
Political Science

Scott Straus (Ph.D. Berkeley, 2004) is a Professor of Political Science who studies political violence, genocide, human rights, and post-conflict politics with an empirical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Improving World Order, the...

Mark Danner

Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education
Graduate School of Journalism
English

Mark Danner is longtime journalist and writer who holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching in both the Graduate School of Journalism and the Department of English. He writes about political violence, war, and American politics, mostly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and teaches courses in foreign and war reporting and the realist and modernist novel.

Daniel J. Sargent

Associate Professor
History
Goldman School of Public Policy
Daniel J. Sargent is associate professor at the University of California, where he is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is a historian who specializes in U.S. foreign policy and the history of international relations. His research has explored how states and decision makers adapt to long-term changes in their international environments, including the historical advance of globalization. He is presently interested in how the United States has strived, over the long arc of its history, to constitute and sustain international order,...