The Syracuse University Board of Trustees has approved promotions for 13 faculty members at the Maxwell School. Six of them were granted tenure in their promotion from assistant to associate professor: Lamis Abdelaaty, Erin Hern, Hugo Jales, Radha Kumar, Tessa Murphy and Abdulaziz Shifa.

Abdelaaty, associate professor of political science, also serves as a senior research associate in the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. Her research focuses on international relations, human rights and humanitarianism, as well as asylum and migration. Her book, “Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees” (Oxford University Press, 2021), asks why countries open their borders to some refugees while blocking others, and why several countries have given the United Nations control of asylum procedures and refugee camps on their territory. She received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2014.

Hern, associate professor of political science, specializes in African politics, comparative politics and political behavior, and women and gender. Her research, based on field work in Zambia, ​Ghana and Senegal, examines structural and institutional influences on political participation. She is the author of “Developing States, Shaping Citizenship: Service Delivery and Political Participation in Zambia” (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and is working on a second book, to be titled “Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don't Always Fall Apart.” In 2013, she won a Fulbright U.S. Student Award. She received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2015.

Jales, associate professor of economics, is also a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research (CPR). He researches labor economics and applied econometrics and has recently focused on investigating the relationship between minimum wage and unemployment, wage inequality, labor tax revenues, and the size of the informal sector. His work has been published in numerous scholarly journals. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of British Colombia's Vancouver School of Economics in 2015.

Kumar is an associate professor of history and a senior research associate in the South Asia Center in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. A historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her research focuses on policing and sovereignty, legal history, and colonial and post-colonial politics. She is especially interested in the Tamil-speaking regions of southern India. Her book, “Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975” (Cornell University Press, 2021), draws on previously unexplored police records to examine the close ties between police and caste authority that were displayed at everyday as well as exceptional moments through much of the 20th century. She received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2015.

Murphy is an associate professor of history whose research focuses on race, slavery, indigeneity and empire in the colonial Americas. Her book, “The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), traces British and French attempts to assimilate or remake colonial societies that evolved beyond the boundaries of European empire in the early modern Americas. In 2021, she received the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, and in 2019 she received the Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2016.

Shifa is an associate professor of economics whose research focuses on economic growth and development, political economy and macroeconomics. Utilizing various economic tools, he explores questions on theories of economic development and policy. His research questions intersect the allocations of production factors in the growth process and their interplay with political incentives. His papers have been published in international journals such as The Economic Journal and the Journal of Development Economics. He earned a Ph.D. from Stockholm University’s Institute for International Economic Studies in 2013.

Seven faculty members were promoted from associate professor to professor: Albrecht Diem, Amy Kallander, George Kallander, Natalie Koch, Yingyi Ma, Shannon Monnat and Farhana Sultana.

Diem, professor of history, studies late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and publishes on the history of monasticism, hagiography, pastoral care, and gender and queer studies. His book, “The Pursuit of Salvation. Community, Space, and Discipline in Monasticism” (Brepols Publishers, 2021), provides a new view on the emergence of monastic life in the early Middle Ages. He has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the American Council of Learned Societies, is an associated researcher at the Medieval Institute of the Austrian Academy of Science and recently held a guest professorship at Innsbruck University. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 2000.

Amy Aisen Kallander, professor of history, is also a faculty affiliate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and a senior research associate with the Middle Eastern Studies Program in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. She is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East. Her most recent book, "Tunisia’s Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s” (Cambridge University Press, 2021), explores women’s roles in political, social and cultural domains in the postcolonial state. An earlier book, “Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia” (University of Texas Press, 2013), provides a social history of women and the family that governed Tunisia in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the SU Humanities Center. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007.

George Kallander, professor of history, is the director of the East Asia Program in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His research focuses on premodern and early modern Korea. He is author of two books, “The Diary of 1636: The Second Manchu Invasion of Korea” (Columbia University Press, 2020) and “Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). His third book, “Human-Animal Relations and the Hunt in Korea and Northeast Asia” (Edinburgh University Press) is expected in the spring of 2023. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2006.

Koch, professor of geography and the environment, additionally serves as director of the Central Asia and the Caucasus Research Group and is a senior research associate for the Middle Eastern Studies Program in the Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs and the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry. Her research focuses on authoritarianism, geopolitics, nationalism and identity politics, and resource governance. She also does work in sports geography. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012.

Ma, professor of sociology, also serves as director of Asian/Asian American Studies and is a University Provost Faculty Fellow. Ma’s research addresses education and migration in the U.S. and China. She has published an award-winning monograph “Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education” (Columbia University Press, 2020) and numerous journal articles, book chapters and essays. She was selected as Public Intellectual Fellow by the National Committee of U.S.-China Relations in 2019. She received a Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 2007.

Monnat, professor of sociology, has numerous roles, including serving as the Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion; director of the Center for Policy Research; co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab; and a research affiliate with the Aging Studies Institute and Center for Aging and Policy Studies. She researches demographic and geographic trends and differences in health and mortality, with an interest in rural health and health disparities. She has published numerous academic journal articles, book chapters, research briefs and reports, and has secured over $10 million in external research funding. She earned a Ph.D. from the University at Albany in 2008.

Sultana, professor of geography and the environment, also serves as the research director for environmental conflict and collaboration in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC) and is a senior research associate with the South Asia Center in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. She has edited three books and numerous publications on political ecology, water governance, climate justice, development, sustainability, human rights, transnational feminism and decolonization. She received the 2019 Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues.” She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2007.