News from the Department of Politics and International Affairs

March 19, 2014

Sara Dahill-Brown, assistant professor, has been named an Emerging Education Policy Scholar by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  The program brings up-and-coming scholars to Washington, D.C., to meet with education-policy experts and to share and brainstorm exciting new directions for K-12 education research. The program focuses on three over-arching goals:

1. To foster an opportunity for talented, promising scholars to connect with other scholars in their field, as well as to introduce them to key players in the education-policy arena;
2. To expand the pool of talent and ideas from which the education-policy arena currently draws; and
3. To increase understanding of how the worlds of policy and practice intersect with scholarly research in education and related fields.

Dahill-Brown’s research focuses on state governments’ commitment to local control of education policy and the degree to which that ideological commitment influences policy formulation and implementation.

Michael Pisapia, assistant professor, has been awarded the 2013 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics for his book project entitled “Governing Education: Gender, Federalism and the Rise of Women’s Political Authority.”  The prize includes a stipend to be used to support the project.

Professor David Weinstein has received the following recognitions/invitations from European universities during the past year:

• Lifetime Honorary Professor of Philosophy, Universitat Oldenburg, Germany
• Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University
• Plumer Research Fellowship at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University
• John Stuart Mill Visiting Chair in Social Philosophy, Universitat Hamburg, Germany