Current Visiting Scholars

While at CASBS, Jeff Bleich will be working on completing two books. The first is an update of Machiavelli’s The Prince for modern times, intended to advise a would-be ruler on how to gain and consolidate the power of the United States. The second is an update of progressive prescriptions from the second industrial revolution in the United States to reform and restore functioning democracy in America.  

Bleich’s writings have focused principally on democracy, international relations, and constitutional law.  His legal career includes serving in the White House, as special counsel to President Obama, law clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States, and president of the State Bar of California. Bleich also served as the 24th United States ambassador to Australia, and senior advisor to the director of National Intelligence.

Bleich is a legal and political scholar/practitioner whose work focuses on law, democracy, and disruptive technologies.  He is a professorial fellow at Flinders University, an ambassadorial fellow at the University of Sydney and chairs the board of the Bleich Centre on Democracy and Disruptive Technologies in Adelaide.  He has also served as chair of the California State University Board of Trustees, chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, trustee of Amherst College, and a member of the CASBS board of directors. 

Bleich holds a BA from Amherst College, MPP from Harvard University, JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and honorary doctorates from San Francisco State University, Griffith University, and Flinders University in Adelaide.

Meg Chren is a physician and health services researcher whose work has focused on understanding, measuring, and improving health outcomes of patients with chronic diseases. She has previously developed and validated the Skindex group of skin-related quality-of-life tools, which were developed with strong collaboration with social scientists, and which are widely used as outcomes measures. While at CASBS she will prepare a manuscript about an important but potentially threatened aspect of American healthcare: relatedness in medicine, specifically, the interface among and between physicians and patients, including their relationships and commitment over time. She will explore the role of relatedness in human psychological health and in healthcare, and evidence that relatedness has been eroded or atrophied in American medicine. The goal of the project is to identify strategies to sustain and nurture relatedness in the context of medical encounters.

Chren is professor and chair of the department of dermatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She has mentored many junior researchers and has authored over 195 peer-reviewed papers. Her work has been funded by grants from the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

While at CASBS, Michael Harsch will be working on completing his second book, Islands of Stability: Subnational Security and Development in Fragile States. It explores how relatively peaceful regions emerge and persist in war-torn countries. The book leverages interviews with local elites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, an original dataset on governors in these countries, and statistical estimations.

Harsch’s research interests include international security, state capacity, conflict, and development. He examines U.S. strategic leadership and joint decision-making with its allies, and the role of leading states, international organizations, and local leaders in promoting security and development in fragile, conflict-affected countries.

Harsch is associate professor of National Security at the National Defense University in Washington DC. He serves as course director for national security strategy & policy at the Eisenhower School and oversees curriculum development and course execution in this area. Harsch has also been a visiting scholar with Harvard University’s Weatherhead Scholars Program and is currently a faculty affiliate of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Identity Politics.

Tsui-Sung Wu is a scholar of gender and media research. She is a professor at the Institute of Hakka Language and Communication of National United University in Taiwan. She also serves as a board member of The Awakening Foundation, a leading feminist NGO in Taiwan.

At CASBS, Wu will conduct research about online gender-based violence in the Taiwanese “manosphere.” She will collect posts containing the phrase “feminist buffet” in Taiwan’s two largest anonymous forums, Dcard and PTT. She will use quantitative content analysis to identify central themes and patterns in these samples and analyze the attitudes and narratives of online respondents. She will also select representative posts for qualitative discourse analysis to decipher the cultural logic and gender consciousness among men’s rights supporters. Additionally, she will devote her time to understanding preventive measures and educational strategies aimed at reducing digital gender violence in the United States.