Department of Political Science
Ph.D. Georgetown University
Yonatan L. Morse specializes in the comparative politics of developing countries, with a focus on democratization and autocratization, political institutions, and policy development. He is the author of How Autocrats Compete: Parties, Patrons, and Unfair Elections in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Between 2020 and 2024 he was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow to develop a book project on the relationship between democracy and social welfare in sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, and Tanzania, and teaches courses in comparative politics on political parties, African politics, and comparative democratization.
Department of Political Science
Ph.D. Northwestern University
Salih Emre Gercek specializes in the history of political thought and democratic theory, with particular attention to equality, participation, and political economy. He is currently working on a book project that explores how the modern idea of democracy emerged in 19th century European thought. He regularly teaches courses in political theory on collectivity, the social contract, and democratic theory.
Department of Political Science
Native American and Indigenous Studies
Sandy Grande’s research interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of a more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was a Ford Foundation Senior Fellow (2019-2020) for a project on indigenous elders and is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman & Littlefield 2004). She is a founder of New York Stands for Standing Rock and one of the authors of the Standing Rock Syllabus.
Department of Political Science
Ph.D. Arizona State University
Michael E. Morrell’s research interests examine deliberative democracy, the connections between empathy and democracy, and emotions and politics. He is currently working on several projects on democratic mini-publics and the role of empathy in democracy. He is the author of Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking and Deliberation (Penn State University Press 2010). At UConn he regularly teaches classes on modern political theory, theory and popular music, and emotions and political theory.
Department of Political Science
Ph.D. Duke University
Matthew M. Singer specializes in questions of how voters achieve political representation and how the political and social context affects political behavior, especially evaluations of government performance and support for democracy. He has conducted several projects in Latin America and has fielded several surveys on modes of representation and populism. In 2015 her was a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and he is a director of the Executive Approval Project on presidential and prime minister approval around the world. Dr. Singer teaches courses in comparative politics on Latin American Politics, voting behavior, and political institutions.
Department of Political Science
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jeremy Pressman studies international relations, protest, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle East politics and US foreign policy. He co-founded the Crowd Counting Consortium, and event counting project that has tallied and made publicly available data on protests in the United States since 2017. He is the author of The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force (Manchester University Press 2020). Dr. Pressman teaches courses on contemporary international relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and security studies.
Department of Political Science
Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University
Seth Warner studies how people relate to American political parties, both in terms of ideology and as a group-based social identity. Several of his current projects rely on his original estimates of affective polarization at the local level, and he actively conducts research on citizen perceptions of political parties and the polarizing effects of elections. Dr. Warner teaches classes on state and local government, public opinion, and electoral behavior.
Former Student Researchers
TBD