Richard A. Nolan (Florida 1994) Lecturer International Relations rnolan@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

 

Conor O'Dwyer Assistant Professor Comparative Politics codwyer@ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Conor O'Dwyer is Assistant Professor of Political Science with a joint appointment through the Center for European Studies.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. His teaching areas include comparative politics, East  European politics, and research design and methods.  His current research focuses on patronage politics, party competition, and state-building in democratizing countries, particularly in post-Communist Europe.  His recently completed dissertation on  this topic  "Runaway State-Building: How Parties Shape States in Post-Communist Eastern Europe," was selected as the best dissertation of 2004 by the European Politics and Society section of the American Political Science Association.   Other research  interests include the politics of EU enlargement, decentralization in comparative perspective, and the political economy of social policy and health care reforms in post-Communist countries.  Prior to coming to the University of Florida, O'Dwyer was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

 

Daniel I. O'Neill (UCLA 1999) Assistant Professor Political Theory doneill@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Daniel I. O’Neill, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., UCLA, 1999).  Professor O’Neill’s primary research and teaching interests are in the history of Anglo-American political thought, particularly as that history intersects with and illuminates a broad array of contemporary theoretical and practical issues, ranging from the politics of multiculturalism to rights talk.  He has published articles on the relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism (The Review of Politics), the political thought of Mary Wollstonecraft (History of Political Thought), the political thought of Edmund Burke (Polity), and is co-editing a book of essays with Iris Marion Young and Molly Shanley.  He has recently finished a book manuscript that reconsiders the roots of modern conservatism and feminism by focusing on the adversarial interpretations of the French Revolution articulated by Burke and Wollstonecraft, specifically by situating their debate within the discursive context of the Scottish Enlightenment.  The next phase of his research will be to investigate the trans-Atlantic role of Scottish Enlightenment ideas at the time of the American Founding and its immediate aftermath.  That project will examine the place of the Scots’ historiographical narrative within the context of early American commercial and cultural expansion, focusing specifically on late eighteenth-century debates about the theoretical and practical status of the peoples of the New World.

Ido Oren (University of Chicago 1992) Associate Professor and Associate Chair International Relations  Comparative Foreign Policy oren@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

My areas of interest include international relations' theory, American foreign policy, history of American political science and philosophy of social science. My book, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Cornell University Press, 2003) questions the objectivity of American political science, as well as its alleged attachment to democracy, by showing that political scientists' portrayals of foreign regimes (Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Fascist Italy) darkened considerably after these regimes became America's enemies, and that America's wars against these regimes occasioned changes in political scientists' portrayals of America itself. I have recently launched a new research project exploring the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy in the energy-rich Caspian Sea region. Please visit my web page to see a full listing of my publications.

Won-Ho Park Assistant Professor Comparative Politics Methodology wpark@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Won-ho Park is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies at the University of Florida. His teaching interests include research methods, comparative politics, and voting behavior.  His research interests include quantitative methods involving ecological inference techniques on aggregate electoral data; electoral dynamics in new democracies with a special focus upon South Korea and East Asia; and how voting technology affects voting behavior.  He studied at Seoul National University (BA and MA) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.).  Currently, he is working on several projects that include the extension of ecological inference techniques and the electoral realignment of South Korean voters.  He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar from South Korea, and was an American National Election Studies Fellow (2003-2004).  His paper "Estimation of Voter Transition Rates and Ecological Inference" won the 2003 Harold Gosnell Prize as the best political methodology paper of the year. The graduate courses he teaches this year are "Linear Models" and "Maximum Likelihood Theory" and the undergraduate courses include "Politics of East Asian Countries" and "Politics of South and North Korea."

Helena Rodrigues Assistant Professor American Politics hrodrigu@polisci.ufl.edu  Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Helena Rodrigues is Assistant Professor of Political Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Latin American Studies.  She completed her graduate work in 2005 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.  Her dissertation "Building Bridges or Blockades? Latinos and Coalitions with African-Americans" examines support for inter-group political alliances in different urban environments.  Professor Rodrigues' research interests are within American politics and political behavior, including minority politics and minority political power in the United States. Her area of specialization is Latino politics, particularly Latino political participation and the political circumstances of Latino immigrants in the United States.  Her two forthcoming publications include a chapter on Latino political participation in the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia on Latinos and Latinas in the United States, and a chapter entitled “A Seat at the Lunch Counter: Latinos, African-Americans, and the Dynamics of American Race Politics,” in the volume Latino Politics: The State of the Discipline edited by Kenneth Meier, University Press of Virginia.  Both pieces are co-authored with Gary M. Segura.  Professor Rodrigues teaches courses on Latino politics in the United States, public opinion, and Latino Studies.

Walter A. Rosenbaum (Princeton 1964) Professor American Politics and Public Policy Environmental Politics tonyros@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Walter Rosenbaum, Professor of Political Science, conducts research and writes extensively about issues related to environmental policy, energy policy, and risk management associated with envioronmental and public health issues. His most recent research includes a commission by the Center for Public Policy and Philanthropy at the University of Southern California,for a study of strategies used by non-profit foundations to influence environmental policymaking and the design of an evaluation of the environmental impact of  the National Flood Insurance Program for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy and the South Florida (Everglades) Ecosystem Restoration Project. During the Fall Semester 2003 he will be a Visiting Professor, Program in the Environment, at the University of Michigan.

Beth A. Rosenson Assistant Professor (MIT, 2000) rosenson@polisci.ufl.edu Home page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Professor Rosenson received her M.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Her research and teaching interests include political reform, political ethics, legislative behavior, comparative state politics, American political development, media and politics, and American political thought. The main theme animating her research is an interest in understanding political reform movements aimed at increasing democratic accountability.  She is currently completing a book manuscript on legislative ethics reform and ethics enforcement in the states from 1954 to 1996. Her work has been published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly and Public Integrity.  She is currently working on two projects. The first addresses the political and economic impact of state ethics laws. A second project examines Congressional support for Israel, focusing on sponsorship, roll-call voting and floor speeches.  Professor Rosenson has also done research on Congressional and state term limits and Congressional campaign finance reform.

Richard K. Scher Professor (Columbia 1972) kingsch@polisci.ufl.edu Home page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

My research interests and publications are mainly on Southern and Florida politics.  In recent year, most of my work has been on voting rights, and I have both published in this area and served extensively as an expert witness in federal court on the side of enhancing minority representation and protecting minority voting rights.  In June, 2002, I was invited to make a presentation to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concerning voter inequities in the 2000 Florida presidential election.  During the academic year 2002-2003, I am a visiting Fulbright scholar in Hungary, serving as the John Marshall Distinguished Chair of American Government for that country.

Katrina Schwartz Visiting Assistant Professor (University of Wisconsin - Madison 2001) Comparative Politics kschwart@polisci.ufl.edu Home page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Katrina Schwartz is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in 2002-2003, taught in the political science department at Penn State University in 2001-2002, and received her Ph.D. in political science in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary research interests are in the comparative politics of post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, nationalism and globalization, and the politics of place and environment. She is currently completing a book manuscript under the working title Globalizing the Ethnoscape: Nature and National Identity after Communism, which explores the interweaving of discourses of nature and nation through case studies of nature management and rural development policy conflicts in Latvia. She has published articles on this topic in Environmental Politics and Cultural Geographies (forthcoming). Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, IREX, and the MacArthur Global Studies Consortium.

Michael J. Scicchitano (University of Georgia 1984) Associate Professor American Politics and Public Policy Public Administration scicc@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Benjamin Smith Assistant Professor Comparative Politics and Asian Studies (University of Washington 2002) Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Benjamin Smith, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Washington 2002).  He is also affiliated with the Asian Studies Program.  His teaching interests include comparative politics, research design and the comparative method, Southeast Asian politics, and the political economy of development.  His research interests include the politics of resource wealth, state formation, regime change and democratization.  His book, "Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil, Opposition, and Late Development," is currently under review.  Smith’s articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of International Affairs, and in an edited volume on Islamic activism.  From 2002 to 2004, he was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.  His research has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the United States-Indonesia Society, and the American Institute for Iranian Studies.  He is currently working on projects focused on political decentralization in new democracies, the persistence of authoritarianism since the Third Wave, and on the persistence of democracy in a handful of oil-rich countries.

Daniel A. Smith Associate Professor (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994) American Politics dasmith@polisci.ufl.edu Home Page Return to the Faculty Research Main Page

Daniel A. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1994, and his B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) in History from Penn State University in 1988.  Professor Smith has published more than two dozen scholarly articles on the politics, processes, and campaign financing of ballot initiatives, as well as on the workings of American political parties and interest groups.  He has also written several articles examining Ghanaian politics.  His book, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy (NY: Routledge, 1998), examined the financial backing and the populist-sounding rhetoric of three anti-tax ballot initiatives: Proposition 13 in California (1978), Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts (1980), and Amendment 1 in Colorado (1992).  Dr. Smith has recently finished a book with Caroline Tobert (Kent State University) entitled, Educated by Initiative: The Democratic Effects of Citizen Lawmaking in the American States, which will be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2004.  Professor Smith serves on the Board of Directors of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Foundation (BISCF), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Research Fellow at Initiative and Referendum Institute, a nonprofit also headquartered in  D.C.