The Department of Political Science welcomes these new faculty members to Temple for the 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years:
Robert L. Brown (Ph.D., University of California-San Diego, 2008), is Assistant Professor of Political Science (International Relations). He teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on international relations theory, international security and international organizations. His research encompasses a number of issues in applying Principal-Agent Theory to international cooperation on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, including measures of delegation, international preferences, and threats, the importance of biased informational agents, and the problems of enforcement. Research and teaching interests: international relations theory, international security, international organizations, principal-agent theories of delegation, US foreign policy, deterrence theory, nuclear weapons strategy and policy.
Jane Gordon (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2005) is Assistant Professor of Political Science (Political Theory). She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2006), which was chosen as the NetLibrary eBook of the Month for February 2007, and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). She is also coauthor of the forthcoming Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Paradigm Publishers) and is completing her next book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham University Press, forthcoming). Dr. Gordon teaches modern and contemporary political thought, black political thought, politics and theory of education, modern women political thinkers, political theory in literature and film, and race and politics.
Roselyn Hsueh (Ph.D, University of California-Berkeley, 2008), is Assistant Professor of Political Science (Comparative Politics). Her research focuses on International and Comparative Political Economy of Development. Her dissertation, "China's New Regulatory State: A Bifurcated Strategy Toward Foreign Investment," examines the relationship between China's FDI policy, industrial development, and market reform. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Southern California's Center for International Studies, she will spend the 2008-2009 academic year transforming her dissertation into a book manuscript. Her other research projects include a comparative study of capital liberalization and industrial development in China, India, and Russia and China's foreign economic policy and its implications in Africa. In addition to dissertation and current research, she has published work on the impact of domestic politics on free trade arrangements between small and large countries. She is affiliated with the Asian Studies program at Temple.
Hillel David Soifer (Ph.D, Harvard University, 2006) is Assistant Professor of Political Science (Comparative Politics). His research focuses on issues of political development in historical and contemporary Latin America. He is currently completing a bookmanuscript on the origins and persistence of variation in state power in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, and has published related articles in 'Latin American Research Review' and 'Studies in Comparative International Development.' He is also interested in the implications of state weakness for both political outcomes and our theories of political science. Dr. Soifer's teaching interests include Latin American politics, comparative politics, the origins of democracy and dictatorship, historical and contemporary approaches to the state, and political methodology (research design and qualitative research methods.)
Sean Yom (Ph.D. Harvard University, expected June 2009) is Assistant Professor of Political Science (Comparative Politics). His primary research and teaching interests center on authoritarian politics, state formation, and late development in the Middle East. His dissertation is entitled "Iron Fists in Silk Gloves: Building Political Regimes in the Middle East." Future projects encompass the study of security networks in the Persian Gulf, as well as trends in US foreign policy within the Islamic world.