The academic year begins at the Maxwell School with the arrival of several new faculty members. In addition, Renée de Nevers, associate professor of public administration and international affairs (PAIA), is the new chair of the Social Science Doctoral Program.

The Social Science Program is designed to allow multidisciplinary scholars to address issues from a variety of perspectives. Students in the program design their own degree and research requirements in consultation with the department chair, drawing from disciplines across Maxwell and beyond.

De Nevers has been a member of the Maxwell faculty since 2004, and served as vice chair of PAIA in 2014-16. She is a former program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and research fellow for several prestigious institutions, including the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Hoover Institution, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. An expert on international security, counterterrorism, and private military and security companies, she wrote Comrades No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe (MIT Press, 2003) and is the co-author of Combating Terrorism: Strategies and Approaches (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2005).

The new faculty members joining Maxwell this year are:

Jonathan “Jeb” Beagles, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs, whose research interests include organization and network theory, specifically as they relate to collaborative and nonprofit governance with a particular interest in international non-governmental organizations. Beagles participated in a five-year study of innovation diffusion within the North American Quitline Consortium, a professional organizational network. His primary role was database management and network analysis. He is actively involved in the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). He was recognized as an outstanding graduate teaching assistant in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona for the 2014-15 academic year, and he earned a PhD in management from the University of Arizona in 2017.

Todd Dickey, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs, researches public sector human resource management, labor and employment relations, and workplace conflict management. His current research explores organizational systems for addressing workplace conflict, as well as innovation and change in federal sector civil service institutions. Dickey served as the academic chair of the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations' Impact Working Group and worked for several years at the Federal Trade Commission.  He is a PhD candidate in industrial and labor relations at Cornell University.

Ryan Griffiths, associate professor of political science, focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty, state systems, and international orders. In his work on secession, Griffiths emphasizes the international and domestic causes of secessionist conflict over time. These causes are articulated in his book Age of Secession: The International and Domestic Determinants of State Birth (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Griffiths also investigates the organization of the international system, especially as it relates to national sovereignty and different types of political order. Previously, he taught at both the University of Sydney in Australia and at John Hopkins University. He also served as a visiting assistant professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies and as a visiting fellow at Yale University’s Macmillan Center. He earned a PhD in international relations and comparative politics at Columbia University in 2010.

Alexander D. Rothenberg, assistant professor of economics, was previously a RAND Corporation economist and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. As an applied microeconomist whose research interests lie at the intersection of development and urban economics, Rothenberg studies the effects of different urban, regional, and private-sector policy interventions. His ongoing research evaluates the effects of different urban transport policies on commuting outcomes in Jakarta, the long-term growth and development outcomes of a place-based policy in Indonesia's outer Islands, the impacts of a rural migration program on diversity and identity, and how transport improvements affect firm entry and employment. Prior to joining RAND, he was a research assistant at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. He received a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.

Robert Terrell, assistant professor of history, specializes in the history of modern Germany and Europe. He is interested in how politics and culture, extending from the local to the global level, remain inextricably linked to capitalism, geopolitics, and translocal flows of goods and ideas. His research has been funded by the J. William Fulbright Program, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service. Previously, Terrell taught world and European history at the University of California, San Diego, and Temple University in Philadelphia. He earned a PhD in modern European history from the University of California, San Diego, in 2018.

09/10/18