Alumni Notes: Early Spring 2024

Sercan Canbolat’s (‘23 Ph.D) book (co-authored with Dr. Özgür Özdamar) Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has received the International Studies Association’s (ISA) 2023 Best Book in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) Award. 

Daniel Fata (CLAS ’94) and Jeffrey Dressler (CLAS ’08) were appointed by Congress to be two of the 16 commissioners on the Afghanistan War Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of key decisions related to US military, intelligence, foreign assistance, and diplomatic involvement in Afghanistan from June 2001 to August 2021. In addition to these two alumni, another one, Jaime Cheshire (CLAS ’99) has been appointed as the executive director of that same commission.  

Prof. John Higley (‘68 Ph.D) published a new book, titled Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics: Avoiding Calamity (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)  

Ross Dardani (‘17 PhD) was awarded tenure at Muhlenberg College, where he is an associate professor of Political Science.  

Sercan Canbolat (’23 Ph.D) and Professor Stephen Dyson have recently published a research article titled “Dominating the Superpower: A Bounded Rationality Approach to Nuclear Proliferation and Inhibition in the U.S. / North Korea Dyad” in the journal of Uluslararası İlişkiler (International Relations). 

Dabney Waring (‘23 Ph.D) and Prof. Alex Anievas published an article titled “The difference multiplicity makes: The American civil war as a passive revolution” in the Review of International Studies (2023): 1-20. 

Kelsey Hammerman (CLAS ’17) was featured on CLAS Connections along with Heather Parker, her advisor for her other major. 

Nicole Freitas (CLAS ’23) won the 2022 Curt F. Beck Law and Public Service Opportunity Fund to pursue an internship at Save the Sound, focusing on climate and policy. 

Garrett West (CLAS ‘23) joined OpenSecrets as a Research Fellow completing his M.A. in American Government at Georgetown University.  

Yinghao Deng (CLAS ’21) will begin working as a lecturer at Yunnan University in China. 

Rajeshwari Majumdar (CLAS ’18) will be joining the Identity & Conflict Lab at Yale as a postdoctoral associate in the fall. She’s finishing her doctorate at NYU in Political Science and graduating this spring.