Synar Fellowship Recipients

I am a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC-Berkeley. Across my work, I use an array of methods to understand how different actors within and outside of the criminal-legal system in the U.S. attempt to manage and make sense of violence, and how those efforts are intertwined with American racial and class hierarchies. Meanwhile, I am also broadly interested in using emerging computational text analysis methods to ask novel questions and generate new ways of understanding social life. Prior to graduate school, I worked in prison condition monitoring, community development, and...

David’s work uses game theory to understand American political institutions. Its focus has been the opportunities for policy and political change that exist given gridlock in Congress. In particular, his dissertation examines presidential unilateral action. Before starting his PhD, he studied economics and government at Hamilton College, graduating summa cum laude in 2010; he then consulted in New York and Washington, DC on securities and antitrust litigation, respectively.

Research Summary: Contemporary American politics is characterized by gridlock at the federal level. Yet while...

Annie Benn is a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley. She studies US political institutions, with a particular interest in executive branch policymaking. Prior to Berkeley, she worked for the energy and climate nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute. She holds an MPA from New York University, and a BA with Honors from Swarthmore College.

Annie's Research: An important area of focus in the study of American political institutions is the expansion of presidential power, and the Congressional response (or lack thereof) to this expansion. Existing research on Congressional...

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. My research examines the origins of socioeconomic and racial inequalities in the United States, drawing from urban sociology, sociology of the family, and the sociology of work. One strand of my research is geared towards understanding how advantaged households maintain their economic standing and transmit their advantages to future generations. In my dissertation, For Rent: Local Residential Development, Rising Housing Costs, and Inequality, I investigate how affluent homeowners across the United States fight to block nearby...