Alexander Agadjanian is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include race and identity, political psychology, and political behavior, largely in the United States.
His core dissertation work centers on the intersection of politics and “racial fluidity,” which reconceptualizes racial identity as flexible and responsive to external factors. Focusing on rapidly growing groups with ambiguous positions in the racial hierarchy such as Hispanic and multiracial Americans, he explores...
Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science
2012 David M. Howard Prize
David E. Broockman (M.A., '12) graduated in 2011 from Yale University with a B.A. (cum laude) in Political Science. He earned a Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 2015 and is now Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His 2011 article "Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators.” (with Daniel M. Butler) received coverage in Science, The New York Times, Washington Post, and...
Karen Villegas is a doctoral candidate in the Berkeley School of Education at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Political Science from UCLA. Karen’s overarching work explores issues of language, citizenship, and nation-building processes.
Karen’s dissertation, supported by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, is a study of the ideological conceptions of language and literacy practices in adult, English as a Second Language (ESL) citizenship classes. Adults enroll in these classes to prepare for the...
The Institute of Governmental Studies wishes to extend its congratulations to Karen Villegas, our 2023 David M. Howard Memorial Prize in American Politics recipient!
About Karen:
I am from the Inland Empire (IE!) and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA. As a Ph.D Candidate in the Berkeley School of Education, I think about the ways in which the powerful set the terms of order and the way we teach according to their codes. I study ways we assimilate nondominant communities – through English – in ESL citizenship classes. And I interrogate how ESL...
Douglas J. Ahler (M.A. '11) was born and raised in San Diego County and attended Occidental College and UCLA before enrolling at UC Berkeley as a doctoral candidate in Political Science. Doug taught social studies at a Los Angeles public high school before becoming a graduate student at Berkeley. His dissertation topic is entitled: "The Electoral Perception: How Americans Understand the Representative Relationship and What It Means for Legislative Politics." His dissertation research analyzes how public perceptions of the political ideology of candidates for elective office, in...
I grew up in the Phoenix and Seattle metropolitan areas, and briefly worked as an audio engineer before attending University of Washington as an undergraduate. I graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in political science. Before attending UC Berkeley for my PhD, I was employed in Seattle as a campaign manager and in Chicago as a high school tutor.
I am now a PhD student in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. I study a variety of topics related to American Politics and Political Behavior, including polarization, elections, public opinion, political...
Joshua Kalla is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where his primary focus in American politics is on the use of randomized field experiments conducted in cooperation with politicians, campaigns, and interest groups to study the causal effect of interactions between citizens, politicians, and campaigns on voter engagement, political participation, and opinion change. His research has been published in Science and the American Journal of Political Science and has been covered by The New York Times, NPR, and other...
Michael Dougal is a Ph.D. candidate in American politics and political methodology. His dissertation develops methods of text-based machine learning to assess political coverage and better understand the ability of the media to monitor elected officials on behalf of voters. He is currently working on using text-based machine learning to provide real time analytics of media coverage across the political Internet. His other ongoing research examines changes in ideology over time. One project draws on over 1 million individual poll respondents to measure public attitudes towards the New...
Isabel García Valdivia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sociology from Pomona College. Her main research interests include immigration, Latinx sociology, family, race and ethnicity, and sociology of aging and life course.
Based on semi-structured interviews, her dissertation explores the effects of immigration status for elderly Mexican immigrants in the U.S. and return migrants to Mexico. In particular, how they come to understand their immigration status – especially undocumented adults – and...
