Current Fellows

Gani Aldashev will dedicate his year at CASBS to studying the political economy of recurrent humanitarian emergencies: when a natural disaster in a poor country usually leads to a rush of generous emergency assistance, with mobilization by public and private actors oriented towards the immediate concerns, but devoting less attention to the post-crisis reconstruction and development of resilience. A key consequence is that the disaster-struck population remains fragile and at the next disaster, the story repeats itself. Because of the climate change and the uneven distribution of its impact on human populations across the world, this vicious cycle could be accelerating.

Aldashev is professor of economics at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His main research fields are development economics, political economics, and economic history. His main expertise concerns the economics and organization of the non-profit and NGO sector, the role of traditional institutions (customary justice, clans/tribes) in developing countries, and the economic history of Central Asia.

Mark Algee-Hewitt will spend the year at CASBS developing a new set of computational methods for exploring the evolution of abstract concepts from the eighteenth-century to the present day. Bringing current computational linguistic tools to bear on the history of ideas, this project uses a series of linked language models to trace semantic distance over time, such that we can witness the mutual interaction of ideas as they merge to form complex compound concepts. This work will result not only in a book project on failed concepts, but a set of publicly available tools that can measure and help explain the success or failure of ideas in history.

Algee-Hewitt is an associate professor of digital humanities in the English department at Stanford University where he directs the Literary Lab (https://litlab.stanford.edu/). His work combines traditional humanities methods of literary study with quantitative and computational analysis. At the Lab, he directs projects on such varied topics as science communication in climate fiction, representations of nineteenth-century domesticity, and, in his forthcoming book The Afterlife of Aesthetics, the dissolution of aesthetic theory and the rise of literary criticism.

While at CASBS, Asanda-Jonas Benya plans to complete her book which is an ethnography of the lives of women miners. The central question she attempts to answer concerns how women miners understand themselves and in turn construct their gendered subjectivities within the masculine underground mining culture. The book is an interdisciplinary response to absences, invisibility, erasures, and silences that mark mining scholarship. It is her attempt to re-claim women’s stories and ‘mark’ their presence in South Africa’s large scale industrial mines. Most importantly, it is an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which women make sense of who they are in this space that has been marked by masculinity. Empirical data she relies on is from her ethnographic fieldwork where she took on a job as a miner, spending over a year working underground as a panel and winch operator and living with mineworkers.

Benya is a senior lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research interests include gender, labour and social movements, human rights and social justice in mining communities. She has published in labour and feminist journals. She is the STIAS-Iso Lomso fellow at CASBS and was a writing fellow at JIAS in Johannesburg (2024) and an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity (AFRE 2018-19). An interview on her work can be found on Spotify using this link. 

During her time at CASBS, Rachel Brulé will complete her second book, tentatively titled Unequal in Office: Dynamics of Gendered Political Marginalization in Rural India, with Alyssa Heinze and Simon Chauchard, and advance her third book, Restorative Weather? Climate Change and the Disruption of Gendered Power. Unequal in Office tackles a core tension in representative democracy: social inequalities color the practice of power, limiting the capacity of elected representatives to shape governmental decisions. With innovative behavioral and attitudinal measures of centrality in democratic decision-making, we experimentally investigate whether changing micro-level institutions helps curb gender gaps in elected officials’ influence. Restorative Weather identifies the ability of climate change-induced extreme weather to alter systems of power in families, economies, and states by altering the gendered division of labor.

Brulé is an associate professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies. She is a political scientist with expertise in the political economy of gender and power, primarily in South Asia. Her research combines experimental methods, innovative theory building, and in-depth qualitative work to identify the causal impact of institutions on the ability of women and other traditionally-marginalized group members to engage states and advance transformative change. 

Her first book, Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India (Cambridge University Press, 2020) won the 2021 Luebbert Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association. She has been selected for a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2024-29). She is partnering with the State Department to expand Afghan women’s educational and economic opportunities through the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience.

For more, please visit: http://rachelbrule.com/

Angelina Chin’s teaching and research interests revolve around the themes of colonialism, political movements, diaspora, feminism, sexuality, and disability in modern East Asia. Her research focuses on the social histories of marginal people, identities and citizenship, as well as transregional networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Japan. She is the author of  Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2023) and Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012). Chin is currently working on two projects on disability. The first one, which Chin will focus on during her term at CASBS, is about the blind workers’ labor movements in Hong Kong since the 1960s. The other is a multimedia project on assistive technologies and devices for people with disabilities.  

Chin is professor of history at Pomona College.  You can read more about her here: https://www.pomona.edu/directory/people/angelina-chin

Dylan Connor will focus on a new project at CASBS that synthesizes the current knowledge on how communities and regions shape the life chances of children raised by foreign- and US-born parents in the United States. This work examines these issues from a historical perspective, providing insights into how to build more equitable and enriching communities and cities, particularly in an era of major technological disruption. He specializes in causal inference and historical and spatial data infrastructure. He has also published widely on topics including the changing geography of the American Dream and spatial wealth inequality, the rural social mobility advantage, and on the economic history of Irish and Jewish immigration.

Connor is an associate professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University and core faculty at the Spatial Analysis Research Center (SPARC).

Additional information can be found here: https://www.profconnor.com/

While at CASBS, Grégoire Croidieu will work on a historical sociology book project with faculty fellow Woody Powell on cognition and institution, essentially asking how the institutional grip is laid upon our mind. The modern Bordeaux wine industry, France, is the context we explore to research this question.

Croidieu is Professor of Entrepreneurship at Emlyon Business School, France. His research studies the historical evolution of regions and industries, such as the Bordeaux, Australian, and Californian wine regions or the US radio industry, as well as public policies supporting economic development. He is very much interested in how novelty sticks in these contexts and occasionally triggers some social change. His work has been published in organizational and sociological journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Croidieu recently co-edited a special issue in Strategic Organization on category and place.

During her time at CASBS, Alia Crum will work on a book exploring how our beliefs shape our lives. Mainstream medicine has focused on designing new treatments, urging preventive behaviors, and targeting genetic makeup. Using interdisciplinary methods, Crums’s research highlights the mind’s central role in these initiatives, uncovering empirical insights and offering theoretical frameworks. Her goal is to write a book that synthesizes her work and ideas for a general audience.

Crum, an associate professor of psychology and medicine (primary care and population health) at Stanford University, is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award. Her work, inspired by research on the placebo effect, demonstrates the mind’s ability to elicit healing. She studies how mindsets affect outcomes in medicine, exercise, diet, and stress, aiming to understand how mindsets can be consciously changed to improve well-being. For more information, please visit https://mbl.stanford.edu/research.

Katherine (Katy) DeCelles plans to use her time at CASBS focused on designing effective randomized control interventions that leverage recent advances in technology to help reduce harmful discrimination occurring in the precarious platform labor market and during high-stakes interactions between police and community members. Her research seeks to understand the psychological mechanisms that explain how individuals and organizations grapple with interpersonal and societal conflict, crime, and various forms of inequality. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to social science that uses experimental, archival, video and qualitative methods, and she is known for her research on conflict in extreme contexts such as in prisons, airplanes, protests, and robbery.

DeCelles holds the Secretary of State Professorship of Organizational Effectiveness at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. You can learn more about her research here: https://discover.research.utoronto.ca/14077-katherine-decelles

DeCelles is the VMware Women’s Leadership Lab Fellow.

During his year at CASBS, Alan Shane Dillingham will work on a narrative non-fiction book that uses family history to explore the intersection of Native dispossession and chattel slavery in the Americas. Tracing the experience of his ancestors, removed from Mississippi to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, Dillingham will examine how slavery fueled the process of Native dispossession while also interrogating how Native Americans participated in systems of oppression. 

Dillingham is a historian interested in Native and Indigenous politics across the Americas, anti-colonialism, and labor and youth-led social movements. He is an associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He serves on the editorial boards of the Radical History Review and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. He also serves on the international collective of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas. His first book, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021) won two awards; the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award and the Conference on Latin American History's María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History.

For more information, please visit: www.alanshanedillingham.com

In recent years, two of the most politically polarizing issues have been international migration and climate change. Separately, these subjects are politically contentious, but the ways in which they are interrelated prompt existential questions related to sustainability, welfare, and justice. During her time at CASBS, Maureen Eger will study the intersection of climate change and migration politics across different political, economic, demographic, and environmental contexts. Her research will take a global view, as both climate change and migration are global phenomena. Widening the scope of inquiry will enhance knowledge about cases not often included in studies of immigration or climate politics, thereby also providing an opportunity to reconsider the scope conditions of existing theories, often taken for granted as universal.

Eger is a comparative political sociologist with specializations in international migration, (neo-) nationalism, and the welfare state. She is an associate professor in the department of sociology at Umeå University in Sweden. She has been a Fulbright Scholar (Stockholm University, Sweden) as well as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) at the University of California Berkeley and at the Research Institute at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) at Stanford University. Eger holds degrees from the University of Washington (PhD, MA) and Stanford University (MA, BA).  

You can read more about her work at: https://www.maureeneger.com/

Alice Farmer is a refugee lawyer studying how climate change alters the international legal framework of forced displacement. Farmer intends to spend the year building proof of concept for a “climate change law lab” that would use interdisciplinary study to equip governments and other stakeholders with the necessary research to form human-rights centered policies in response to climate-change-induced displacement. Additionally, Farmer is working on an edited volume under contract with Edward Elgar titled Climate Change, Migration, Gender, and the Law.

Farmer is on leave from running the United States legal team for the United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre in spring 2024. At UNHCR, she spent seven years litigating for UNHCR, raising international refugee law issues in appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court to defend the right to seek asylum and other core human rights norms. Farmer has worked in field offices of UNHCR, including in Chisinau, Moldova, where she was deployed to help establish the emergency response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Previously, Farmer worked as an international human rights lawyer for the ACLU, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Human Rights Watch, where she led the organization’s campaign to end immigration detention of children. Farmer serves on the board of the Bromley Charitable Trust, an environmental philanthropic foundation.

In his year at CASBS, Noam Gidron will embark on a new research project that explores the role of national identities in shaping our polarized politics. The goal of this project is to theorize and empirically investigate from a comparative perspective how national identities are linked with mass attitudes and commitment to democratic norms, map onto partisan identities, and provide opportunities for political mobilization.

Gidron is an associate professor at the department of political science and the joint Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests lie at the intersection of political behavior and political economy, with a substantive focus on populism, polarization and democratic backsliding.

For more, please visit https://noamgidron.com/

At CASBS, Aaron Glantz will incubate a new initiative that builds resilience for investigative journalists, human rights advocates, and others dedicated to social change. A two-time Peabody Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Glantz is known globally as a leader of investigative projects that drive impact. Projects he’s led have sparked new laws that curtailed the opioid epidemic, improved care for U.S. military veterans, and kept the FBI’s international war crimes office open. They have also prompted dozens of Congressional hearings and investigations by the FBI, DEA, and United Nations. His reporting has appeared in nearly every major media outlet, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, NBC News, ABC News, Reveal and the PBS Newshour, where his investigations have received three national Emmy nominations.

A former war correspondent who has reported from a dozen countries, including Iraq, Glantz has been a fellow at the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center, a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.  He is author of four books, among them Homewreckers (Harper Collins, 2019), which probed hedge fund profiteering off the 2008 financial crisis. A sought-after speaker and teacher, Glantz is known for developing talent across all media platforms. As an executive-in-residence at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education he mentors a new generation of journalists of color.

Hyeonho Hahm will spend his year at CASBS focusing on three key research areas: scrutinizing how partisanship and polarization affect the domestic constituency mechanisms underlying theoretical models of compliance; investigating how delegation to courts and international bodies influences institutional legitimacy, party support, and populism in Europe and beyond; and examining the conditions under which democratic attitudes, conceptualized and measured as diffuse support, moderate affective polarization and enhance institutional legitimacy.

Hahm was an assistant professor at Hanyang University before joining the CASBS fellowship. He will start his new position at the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University in August 2025. 

His research broadly seeks to understand the micro-foundations of political institutions and policy-making processes at both domestic and international levels. By integrating macro-level political institution frameworks with micro-level behavioral theories, he investigates how the design of political institutions and policy-making processes influence party politics, dispute settlement, and institutional legitimacy. His recent work has been published in American Political Science Review, International Organization, European Journal of Political Research, and West European Politics, among others. Hahm received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He is the inaugural CASBS-Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Fellow in 2024-25.

For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/site/hyeonhohahm/

During his fellowship Thomas Hansen will write a book, tentatively titled City of Enemies, that seeks to rethink urban experience from the Global South and beyond the classical themes of urban theory. The book focuses on the city of Aurangabad in India, a rapidly growing city that like hundreds of cities across South Asia is shaped by a long history of street riots between religious communities and antagonistic caste groups. Drawing on diverse materials gathered over three decades, Hansen will describe mutually hostile social worlds marked by deep inequalities, social segregation, fear and suspicion of ‘categorical others’, where community and informal networks of trust appear as indispensable guarantees of livelihoods, dwelling and a future.

Hansen is professor of anthropology at Stanford University. He has done extensive work on the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, Hindu-Muslim conflicts, identity politics, violence and memory in urban India, the anthropology of the state, configurations of sovereignty in the postcolonial world, as well as township life, religious revival, melancholia, memory and cultural politics among Indians in post-apartheid South Africa. He is the author of multiple books and articles, most recently The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics (Aleph Book Company, 2021) and Saffron Republic: Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India, Edited with Srirupa Roy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

For more details, please visit: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/thomas-hansen

During her time at CASBS, Camilla Hawthorne will begin a new project that explores the rich historical and contemporary linkages between Black liberation struggles in southern Europe and North America. Her goal is to weave a global, relational story about abolition geographies stretching across the Black Mediterranean and Black Atlantic diasporas—diasporas that are connected through shared histories of racial capitalist dispossession, technologies of displacement and confinement, and creative strategies of radical world-making. Hawthorne is associate professor of sociology and critical race & ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022; translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni, 2023) and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023). Hawthorne is founder and co-director of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. For more information, please visit: https://www.camillahawthorne.com/

Matthew Hull will spend his fellowship year working on a book titled, Incorporations: Capitalism, Communication, and Collective Life, that will extend the anthropological study of governance from the state to modern corporations as politico-legal institutions, emphasizing communicative practices as key to their political-economic significance. The book will place corporations at the center of early American democracy and examine a diversity of corporations, from the English East India Company to contemporary New Guinea land corporations.

Hull is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the nexus of representation, technology, and institutions, especially in the Indian Subcontinent. His book, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (University of California Press, 2012), examines governance as a semiotic and material practice through an account of the role of writing and written artifacts in the operations of city government in Islamabad. It was awarded the 2019 J.I Staley Prize of the School of Advanced Research. He has also worked on lotteries and police in contemporary India, and the deployment of American technologies of democracy in urban India from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

For more information, please visit: sites.lsa.umich.edu/matthewhull/

Weng Cheong Lam will spend his time at CASBS working on a writing project that delves into the development of market systems in ancient China. By blending historical texts with archaeological discoveries and recent advances in archaeological science, this project aims to explore how the distribution of commodities reflects underlying market systems and their historical evolution. Focusing on the political transformations during the Han empire, the project will also tell the stories of goods used in daily life and engage archaeological studies in interdisciplinary discourses on markets, contributing to a broader discussion about the rationale behind economic systems in ancient China. This exploration will also prompt a reconsideration of the consequences of political turmoil and its impacts on economic systems.

Lam is an associate professor of archaeology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. An expert in the archaeology of ancient China, his work focuses on the development and social control of ancient metal technology and commodity economies. In addition to various scholarly articles in archaeological science, Lam is the author of Connectivity, Imperialism, and the Han Iron Industry (Routledge, 2022) and one of the authors of the forthcoming work The Archaeology of Han China (Cambridge, 2024). Lam is the CUHK-Stanford University CASBS fellow for 2024-25.

Pei-Chia Lan will dedicate her time at CASBS to writing about the second generation (children of cross-border marriages) in Taiwan. Based on in-depth interviews with fifty-seven young adults whose immigrant mothers emigrated from Southeast Asia or China, this project explores their lived experience and identity formation in the changing multicultural policy regime and broader geopolitical context. Additionally, she will write a short book, entitled Global Taiwan: A Lens of Migration (under contract with Cambridge University Press Element series). This book uses migration as a central framework to examine the complexities of global Taiwan and adopts a transnational approach to examine four major migration pathways, professional, business, labor, and marriage, and the rising trends of reversed, return, and circular migration.

Lan is distinguished professor of sociology at National Taiwan University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006), which won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars, and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford, 2018). She is the Stanford-Taiwan Social Science fellow for 2024-25.

For more information, please visit: http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~pclan/english.html

Seth Landefeld will spend his fellowship year writing a series of papers that address the challenges facing primary healthcare (which some have termed the “primary care crisis”).  The goals of this work are to build understanding of the crisis and to catalyze efforts that will lead to its resolution.  Although primary care is the only health care that consistently improves the health and well-being of communities, reduces health inequities, and lowers total health care costs, primary care is not accessible to many Americans.  Primary care spending has decreased 25% in less than a decade, and the number of US primary care physicians has plummeted.  Many rural counties have no primary care clinicians, and most medical centers and healthcare groups now have difficulty hiring primary care physicians.  Loss of primary care affects disproportionately those who have fewer socioeconomic resources, worsening inequities in health care.  Landefeld will articulate a taxonomy for primary care, describe the crisis and its historical basis, propose a conceptual model for the crisis, and suggest pragmatic, feasible strategies that may advance primary care and its benefits.

Landefeld is a physician, geriatrician, and health services researcher whose research has developed and tested multi-disciplinary interventions to improve the health of vulnerable older people with serious illness.  Most recently, as chair of the department of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he transformed the largest department of medicine in the deep south to advance health and to create the future of health care through major clinical, educational, and research initiatives. Landefeld was a fellow at CASBS in 2008-09.

Armando Lara-Millan is writing a book tentatively titled The Firm That Predicted the Future and the Birth of a New Global Economy. It argues that over the past forty years, five global political-economic dynamics were largely mistaken for the new, permanent rules of the globalized economy. Instead, they were one-time, historically contingent developments that are now rapidly changing. Pairing a qualitative study of a key investment firm with the natural language processing of decades of corporate quarterly reports, Lara-Millan details the end of low-cost labor in China, the transition from high-growth to cyclical internet-beneficiary sectors, the move from cheap energy to expensive raw materials, the inability to further lower corporate taxes and the cost of corporate borrowing, and the uncertain role of performative monetary policy. The book offers a way of making sense of our supposed “polycrisis” to understand better how a new order is struggling to be born in the present.

Lara-Millan is an associate professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and a faculty lead of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. Alongside publications in leading journals, his first book, Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity (Oxford University Press, 2021) won the overall book prize of the American Sociological Association. 

During the fellowship year at CASBS, Seung-joon Lee will complete his second book, Revolutions at the Canteens: Dietary Energy and the Politics of Canteen Meals in Industrial China. This work, which places food at the core of the paradigm shift in energy and labor history, will delve into one of the intriguing puzzles of China’s industrialization that belatedly and yet rapidly unfolded in the twentieth century. In industrial China, fossil fuel energy, while indispensable, appeared more deficient and dependent; instead, labor and dietary energy stored in laborers’ muscles mattered more. Lee’s research will illuminate how the rise of a strictly calorie-based understanding of food as dietary energy, which blossomed well before the PRC’s founding in 1949, more bequeathed to, rather than repudiated by, the Communists even after the 1949 regime change. Furthermore, it helped legitimize, albeit unintentionally, Mao’s coercive industrial labor mobilization.  

Lee is teaching modern Chinese history as an associate professor at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Gourmets in the Land of Famine (Stanford University Press, 2011). His research has been awarded Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholarship, Jing Brand Scholarship of Needham Research Institute, and Residential Fellowship of National Humanities Center. He is a National University of Singapore Fellow for 2024-25.

During her year at CASBS, Katerina Linos plans to investigate how international organizations respond to crises, with a specific focus on the actions taken by the EU in response to the challenges of Covid, migration, financial instability and climate change over the past three years. Her research aims to provide insights into the ways in which international organizations adapt to and address pressing global issues.

Linos is a law professor at UC Berkeley, who teaches international business transactions, international law, European Union law, and international organizations. Her research focuses on the diffusion of ideas around the world. Her PhD is in political science, and much of her work is empirical. Her book, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries (Oxford University Press, 2013) won multiple awards. Through a Carnegie Fellowship, Linos studied how information and misinformation shape refugee and migration law. Her team conducted and analyzed thousands of interviews and Facebook posts to present the European refugee crisis from the perspective of migrants at digitalrefuge.berkeley.edu.

Thomas P. Lyon will spend his fellowship year writing a book on Beating the Greenwashers: How Authentically Green Companies Can Get the Credit they Deserve (Stanford University Press) with Professor Wren Montgomery (also a CASBS fellow), synthesizing the insights from their numerous papers on greenwashing in form accessible to a wide audience and seeking to drive change in the world of practice.  

Lyon holds the Dow Chair of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the University of Michigan, with appointments in both the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability. His research covers self-regulation, regulatory preemption, voluntary environmental programs, greenwashing, astroturfing, and corporate non-market strategy. He coined the term Corporate Political Responsibility in the 2018 article CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics, chosen as the Best Paper in California Management Review that year, and he recently published Corporate Political Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which expands upon the concept. 

Lyon was a founder of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), hosted its first conference, and served as its president.  He received the World Sustainability Award in 2023, and the 2022 Distinguished Scholar Award from the organizations and the natural environment division, Academy of Management. 

Devorah Manekin will spend her time at CASBS working on a project on the dynamics of protest coalitions in the struggle for social justice and equality. Examining a number of empirical settings, the project will explore how group identity shapes the trajectories of nonviolent resistance campaigns, whether and how allyship across group lines can shape these trajectories, and at what costs.

Manekin is a senior lecturer in the department of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she co-directs the Inequality and Social Change Lab. She is the author, among other works, of Regular Soldiers, Irregular War: Violence and Restraint in the Second Intifada (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her research interests are in the field of contentious politics and conflict processes, with current work focusing on two areas: the role of identity, and in particular gender and ethnicity, within resistance campaigns, as well as more broadly how contemporary protest movements are affected by political polarization and intergroup conflict.

For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/site/devorahsmanekin/.

While at CASBS, A. Wren Montgomery will be working on a new book on greenwashing tentatively titled, Beating the Greenwashers. This book draws on extensive research to offer a new paradigm for businesses, namely, how to gain or maintain competitive advantage in an environment where many competitors are exaggerating and being deceptive. 

Montgomery is an associate professor of management and sustainability, and JJ Wettlaufer Faculty Fellow at the Ivey Business School at Western University, Canada, as well as a faculty affiliate at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Enterprise. Montgomery’s research on firm environmental communications has been pivotal in defining greenwash and its tactics, and informing strategies to stop it. Her research has been featured in top academic journals and in prominent media outlets, such as The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, CBC Marketplace, CBC News, Bloomberg News, and The Washington Post among others.

In 2023, Montgomery co-founded the Greenwash Action Lab to make academic research and insights accessible to policymakers, NGOs, and managers leading anti-greenwashing efforts. Montgomery also researches issues at the intersection of justice and sustainability, including award-winning research on the Detroit waters shutoffs and access and affordability challenges. She currently serves as co-lead of the Impact Scholar Community, a community of early-career organizations researchers seeking to do socially and environmentally impactful research, and she is also an experienced management consultant and senior government policy analyst.

During her time at CASBS, Anne Joseph O’Connell will work on her book, Stand-Ins: Causes and Consequences of Temporary Leadership. Using a range of sectors—including government, business, religion, and sports—and a range of materials—encompassing legal items, social science research, business and leadership studies, and historical examples, the book explores the drivers and effects of temporary leaders as well as the constraints under which they operate, how such leaders could be more effective, and when and how interim officials should become more permanent leaders.

O’Connell is the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research. Her research outside the book project focuses on administrative law and the federal bureaucracy, including agency rulemaking, the selection of agency leaders, the civil service and other forms of agency capacity, and bureaucratic organization (and reorganization). She is also a presidentially appointed member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency dedicated to improving regulatory procedures and frequently consults with congressional staff, nonprofit organizations, and others.

For more information, see: https://law.stanford.edu/anne-joseph-oconnell/

Ann Owens will spend her CASBS fellowship interrogating the role of housing in neighborhood and school inequality, guided by two broad questions. First, where should we build affordable housing to provide low-income children access to “high opportunity”? While substantial evidence shows that neighborhoods “matter,” there is less clarity about how they matter. Owens will investigate the neighborhood features most impactful for children’s future economic mobility and well-being and explore how to best translate social science knowledge to housing policy. Second, how do housing and school policies jointly (re)produce inequalities? Student assignment policies that determine the relationship between neighborhoods and schools dictate the effectiveness of housing policies aimed at integration. Owens will explore how housing and school policies interact to identify promising policy combinations for reducing residential and school segregation.

Owens is professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on the causes and consequences of social inequality, with a focus on urban neighborhoods, housing, education, and geographic and social mobility. With sean f. reardon, Owens co-leads the Segregation Explorer, an initiative that provides comprehensive data and research on residential and school segregation (http://edopportunity.org/segregation). Owens is a William T. Grant Scholar at CASBS.

During her time at CASBS, Carrie Rentschler will be completing a book, Bystanding: Media Witnessing and Small Scale Social Change, which examines the transformation of the bystander from a passive observer to an agent of social change in the U.S. Starting with the infamous story of 37 witnesses who supposedly watched the 1964 murder of Catherine Genovese and did nothing to stop it, the book follows the figure of the bystander through mid-century social psychological research and teaching curricula that popularized the phenomenon of the “bystander effect”; popular media re-enactments of the murder; experiments that aimed to create witnesses who would stand in for failed bystanders; and contemporary feminist and anti-racist social movement materials that train bystanders to intervene. Today’s social movements imagine bystanders as people with the agency to stop or document acts of oppression and violence, often through a speech act or through using mobile media. The book examines how “being on standby,” with ready-to-hand internet-connected mobile devices, represents a new orientation for scalable social change.

Rentschler is an associate professor in the department of art history and communication studies and an associate member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at McGill University.  Her research focuses on feminist movement activism, social media, gender violence, technology studies, and the politics of care and witnessing. She is author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and Media in the U.S. (Duke, 2011) and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place (Berghahn, 2016). In a new area of research, she is studying how Type 1 diabetes shapes the quantified self.  For more information, visit her faculty page at: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/people-contacts/faculty/rentschler

Michelle See will spend her year at CASBS examining the influence of message tailoring on the effectiveness of persuasion and interventions for the improvement of intergroup relations. She will consider how psychological processes within the individual interact with broader political, cultural, and historical contexts to influence receptivity or resistance to solutions that are intended to promote positivity between groups. This work will yield insights on our theoretical understanding of the tailoring of messages and interventions by integrating perspectives from various disciplines including psychology, political science, and sociology. It will also inform policy-making for addressing prejudice and polarization. 

See is an associate professor of social psychology at the National University of Singapore, where she directs the Group for Persuasion and Evaluative Processes (GPEP). She has published research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, and cultural factors in attitudes and persuasion. Her research has been cited in handbooks for scholars in social psychology and consumer psychology, as well as social psychology textbooks for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Her research has been funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education, Singapore Prime Minister's Office, and the USA Air Force Office of Scientific Research. See is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). She is a National University of Singapore Fellow for 2024-25. 

More information on her work can be found here https://michellesee.com

A professor at Stanford Law School since 2012, Shirin Sinnar researches the legal treatment of political violence, the procedural dimensions of civil rights litigation, and the role of institutions in protecting individual rights and democratic values in the national security context. In her year at CASBS, Sinnar plans to research the construction of terrorism as a category and set of ideas for conceptualizing and responding to political violence, with a particular focus on the role of law and legal institutions.

Her recent work assesses legal responses to hate crimes and domestic and international terrorism under U.S. law.  In 2017, she was the co-recipient of the inaugural Mike Lewis Prize for National Security Law Scholarship for her article, The Lost Story of Iqbal. Sinnar serves as a gubernatorial appointee on the California Commission on the State of Hate, a commission to assess data, support victims, and make policy recommendations related to hate crimes. She has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and other legislative bodies on hate violence and other issues. Sinnar is a member of the American Law Institute, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the editorial board of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. She received the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. Prior to her faculty appointment, Sinnar taught first-year law students as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow; served as a civil rights lawyer with the Asian Law Caucus and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco for five years; and clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School (JD), Cambridge University (M Phil International Relations), and Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (summa cum laude, AB History).

During his time at CASBS, Jas Sullivan will complete his fourth book, tentatively titled, Race-Based Trauma Induced Political Beliefs and Behaviors. Much of psychology, health, and politics research has focused on measuring the frequency (or presence) of the racial discrimination African Americans encounter. However, moving beyond simply measuring the frequency of discrimination, Sullivan utilizes measures that capture trauma symptoms, as result of experiences with racial discrimination, to better understand its impact on beliefs and behaviors in the political sphere.

Sullivan is the Russell B. Long Professor of Political Science, Psychology, and African American Studies at Louisiana State University.  His research explores the ways racial trauma, racial identity, and coping impact both political and psychological beliefs and behaviors. He is the author of African American Coping in the Political Sphere (SUNY Press, 2023), Dimensions of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Beliefs (SUNY Press, 2018), and The Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus: Race and Representation in the Pelican State (LSU Press, 2011).

For more information, please visit his website: https://www.iticlab.com

The intersection of morality and markets that often shapes our economic landscape will be Stephanie Wang’s focus this year. Specifically, she plans to explore ethical judgments about markets for existing and emerging performance enhancing technologies and the regulatory implications using data from structured discussions and experiments. What narratives and norms do people use to make sense of the moral implications of new technologies? Do they rely on parallels to historical precedents and what prognostications about the future are they more likely to trust? How malleable are these judgments in response to new information that may affect the tradeoffs between old and new technologies for example? What types of principles, causal relationships, and anecdotes are used to change others' minds and which arguments are successful in shifting opinions? A better understanding of how the boundary between permissibility and repugnance is drawn and redrawn can inform pressing policy debates.  

Wang is professor of economics at University of Pittsburgh. Most of her research involves studying decision-making and strategic interactions through a behavioral economics lens with experimental methods. Her work on topics ranging from optimal adaptive methods for eliciting economic preferences to the strategic importance of higher-order beliefs to choices and cognition under scarcity has appeared in American Economic Review, Econometrica, NHB, PNAS, and Review of Economic Studies among others. She has served as an associate editor at European Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, and Management Science.

For more information, please visit: http://www.pitt.edu/~swwang

Scholarship on technology governance often emphasizes conventional implementations overlooking alternative narratives. Anne L. Washington will spend her time at CASBS writing about the role of blockchain as a digital ledger within communities underserved by a trusted authority. Blockchain democratized administrative record-keeping, making it possible for any group of people to become their own archival institution. While grounded in the specifics of building digital cryptographic transactions, this project explores why communities embrace open systems they can control.

Washington is a computer scientist who specializes in data policy. Drawing on theories from management information systems and organizational sociology, her work asks how digital innovation transforms social norms in business and public life. She is an assistant professor of data policy at New York University and serves as the director of the Digital Interests Lab which was initially funded from her NSF CAREER grant on open data governance. She has testified before Congress and with several international, national, and regional governments on technology policy. She has published widely in journals and ACM conferences, and is the author of Ethical Data Science: Prediction in the Public Interest (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her research is at the forefront of the burgeoning scholarship on public interest technology and joins others developing interpretive approaches to data science.  

For more information, please visit: http://annewashington.com