Graduate

This course is designed to provide students with guidance, structure, and feedback that will help them to frame and execute well specified and coherent research projects that broadly address political economy in international relations. The seminar also offers students an opportunity to work through their ideas and test their arguments in an informal, small, and collegial setting.  Students will present their own research, comment on the research of their peers, and learn about different types of feedback mainly through example.

The main aims of this workshop are met through a forum in which faculty and graduate students at various career stages work closely together. It is an applied workshop with an emphasis on learning by doing and on learning how to be a more constructive colleague. Rather than segregate PhD students by cohort, the workshop is designed to bring cohorts together in order to facilitate the student-to-student transfer of skills and knowledge.

The goal of this yearlong course is to provide a forum in which students propose, develop, and complete a research project that produces a journal-length paper of publishable quality. This paper will typically serve as students' second-year M.A. essay, and the course is intended as a complement to that requirement. This course is primarily oriented towards second-year Ph.D. students in any subfield (students in other years may participate with the professors’ consent). The course meets regularly during parts of the fall semester and irregularly during the spring semester. In the first few weeks of the course, we discuss the process of moving from research topic to research question; and we survey published articles by recent Ph.D. students/assistant professors, focusing on the structure and nature of the writing and presentation as well the quality of the argument and evidence. We then move to students’ research proposals for the rest of the fall semester. During the spring semester, students meet individually with the course instructors and their advisors, develop and revise drafts of their papers, and present their work at a department “APSA-style” conference. In order to complete the course and receive credit, students must complete the requirements for both semesters.

This PhD course provides an overview of theories of organizations as they pertain to the behavior of individuals as atomistic agents and collective actors in the context of political life. Students will engage both foundational texts and recent research to build a comprehensive understanding of how organizational logics structure politics. Topics include identity, networks, social movements, parties, and bureaucracies. Assignments will include weekly memos, conceptual "maps" of the field, and a final project that advances students’ own research agendas.

This course provides an introduction to the methodology of game theory and related modeling techniques, with a focus on applications in the study of politics.  The goal of the course is to get students familiar with the basic tools and frameworks of formal models as used in political science research.  This will enable you to be a more-informed reader of the growing body of literature that uses these methods or that tests predictions derived with them.  It should also prove useful in structuring your thinking about political actors and outcomes even when you are not explicitly using a formal model.  This course will also provide a starting point for students who hope to pursue more advanced training and even to use formal theory in their own future research.

Discussion sections meet Wednesday 2-3pm in SOCS791.

The focus of this course is on statistical methods for causal inference.

Discussion sections meet Fridays 2-3:30pm in SOCS202.

This graduate seminar on international political economy will cover a variety of core topics in the field of IPE. These include trade, international institutions, the role of multinational corporations in politics, foreign direct investment, monetary policy, sovereign debt, foreign aid, and environmental politics.

This course is intended for PhD students in political science. It assumes some pre-existing background in international relations and comparative politics. The goal is for students interested in international relations and domestic politics to develop a stronger grounding in the literature, critique research design, propose improvements, and begin to develop their own related work. 

Spring 2026 meetings are being relocated to SOSC749 (Pitkin Room) as of 2/4/26.

This graduate seminar explores central themes and concepts in the history of African American political thought. It takes up the major philosophical questions that shaped the tradition from the early nineteenth through the mid twentieth century by reading seminal texts as works of moral and political theory. Students are therefore expected to dive beneath the rhetorical and polemical surface to the analytical and normative substratum of these works. The seminar is organized
historically and thematically into four parts. Each part addresses a historical conjuncture and a set of political and normative questions that predominated. Part I looks at slavery through works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany to ask, among other questions: What is the nature of slavery? How does each author’s account shape his or her understanding of political freedom? Part II takes up white supremacy by reading works by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson. In this section, we focus on social domination, exclusion, and inequality. Part III looks at the international and Marxist turn in black political thought in the interwar years, specifically, writings by Marcus Garvey, Harry Haywood, and others in the black radical tradition. Part IV concludes the course by asking how that global turn, namely decolonization, influenced the struggle for civil rights in the United States. To answer this question, we read Frantz Fanon, authors of Black Power, and Martin Luther King Jr.