Mary Shi is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Mary's research examines the intersection of society, space, and politics in multiple domains, from the political economy of the San Francisco Bay Area to the historical formation of the American state. Mary received her BA from Yale University in Political Science and Molecular Biochemistry & Biophysics. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, and has appeared in ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies.
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...
Bonnie Cherry is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law, with a Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion. Bonnie is a recipient of the Berkeley Mentored Research Award and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and is currently a Berkeley Empirical Legal Scholars fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. She received her undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley where she received the Departmental Citation for Distinguished Undergraduate Research and graduated summa cum laude.
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 PhD candidate in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, I graduated with a BA in political science and sociolegal studies from the University of Washington and earned a MSc in politics research at the University of Oxford (Nuffield College). I study race and ethnic politics, political psychology, and political behavior. My dissertation focuses on the politics of white racial identity in the US.
Anna's Research: Over the past decade, white Democrats have become remarkably more liberal on race-related issues. What explains this...
