Student News

GRADUATE STUDY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

Brown’s Department of Political Science offers exceptional resources for

the advanced study of politics across a wide range of areas. Committed

to excellence in scholarship, to methodological diversity, and to

interdisciplinarity, the department is a stimulating intellectual

community situated on a vibrant university campus. Our students benefit

from the opportunity to work closely with prominent scholars in the

field, and they enjoy access to first-rate libraries, a variety of

related centers and research institutes, and wide-ranging support for

their own research – from methods workshops to fieldwork to conference

travel. The community of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows,

visiting scholars, and faculty members in political science is a close

and collegial one; and our graduate students are among the happiest you

will find anywhere. We offer all our graduate students five years of

guaranteed funding, with a current stipend of $19,000 annually, and

provide extensive support for professional development, including

workshops on topics such as publishing, grant-writing, conference

participation, and the job market. Our job placement record is a strong

one, with graduates since 2003 taking faculty positions at institutions

such as American University, Bucknell, Clemson, CUNY, Dickinson,

Dartmouth, SUNY, Clark, Beloit, Lake Forest, Rutgers, Trinity, and

others. What follows is a brief description of research strengths at

Brown in each of the four subfields.

The comparative politics subfield has particular strengths in the

political economy of development; ethnic identity and conflict; the

politics of social welfare; regimes and regime change; and qualitative

methods. Our faculty are engaged in broadly-comparative as well as

regionally-focused research, including South Asia, Latin America, the

Mid-East and North Africa, and the Post-Soviet region.  Resources for

graduate students include Brown’s Watson Institute for International

Studies, which hosts the Colloquium on Comparative Research lecture

series and provides interdisciplinary training opportunities through the

Graduate Program in Development; the Post-Communist Politics and

Economics Workshop; and the Seminar on South Asian Politics, both

co-sponsored with other Boston-area universities.

The American Politics subfield at Brown provides graduate students with

opportunities to learn from and work with eminent scholars in a wide

range of specialties, including minority and urban politics, American

political development, legislative politics and institutional public

policy. Brown faculty and students enjoy ties with Brown’s Urban Studies

Program, Taubman Center for Public Policy, and Education Department.

Building on these ties, Political Science faculty and students have

become national leaders in the study of American political institutions,

race, health policy and education policy.

The subfield of International Relations has traditionally been divided

into areas such as international security, international organization,

and international political economy. While offering expertise in each of

these areas, the IR group at Brown seeks to emphasize how the study of

‘the international’ in a post-cold war, globalized environment

necessarily exhausts such categories and invites linkages across other

fields such as comparative politics, political theory, political

psychology, and political economy. As such, faculty structure their

research and teaching thematically, offering graduate courses in areas

such as money and finance; continuity and change in international

orders, post-Cold War conflict, and International Relations theory.

The political theory subfield is especially strong in the areas of

democratic and liberal theory. Faculty research interests include

justice and difference; the foundations of democratic authority and the

meaning of rights; democracy and political economy; public deliberation

and the emotions; political theory and the law; the theory and practices

of freedom; American political thought; civic engagement and the

public/private divide; and international political theory. We approach

these topics both analytically and through the history of political

thought. Graduate students work closely with department faculty as well

as with associated faculty in departments that include Philosophy and

Religious Studies. They also benefit from engagement with the

postdoctoral fellows in the Political Theory Project at Brown and from

the Political Philosophy Workshop, which brings together department

faculty members, graduate students, postdocs, and prominent scholars in

the field discuss work in progress. Our students have an unusually

prominent role in the intellectual life of the political theory

community here.

In addition to the strengths found within each of the four subfields,

the department as a whole has cross-cutting strengths in

interdisciplinary areas that cross between the subfields, such as

ethnicity and politics; political economy; the politics of race and

gender; political psychology; world politics; political

development/political history; mass politics in democracies; public

policy and administration; urban politics; and politics and the law.

For more information, visit

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science.