Lin Bian examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social categories. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: one line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially as how they apply to behaviors within vs. acrossgroup boundaries. Before moving to the University of Chicago, she was the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor at Cornell University. She obtained her B.S. in Psychology at Zhejiang University (China) and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Terra Edwards is a linguistic anthropologist whose research is concerned with the existential and environmental conditions that support language emergence. Since 2006, she has been pursuing this interest with DeafBlind communities in the U.S., where new ways of being DeafBlind are emerging alongside a new tactile language. Broadly speaking, her work asks: How do diverse ways of being in the world give rise to particular kinds of languages? She completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the Department of Comparative Human Development, she was a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University and the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Saint Louis University.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
The ostrich pillow! It blocks everything out. Sometimes, when I have been working long hours, or have encountered a seemingly intractable problem, I like to put my head into the ostrich pillow and fall asleep. There are many possibilities for how this can be done. My two favorite ways are (1) seated in my chair with my head resting on the seat back; and (2) seated in my chair, with my head face-down on the table and my arms tucked into the ostrich-pillow pockets above my head. After 10 minutes, I usually experience a renewed sense of optimism with respect to any problem or state of affairs.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
For the past several years, I have been working in close collaboration with Diane Brentari to analyze the structure of a tactile language emerging in networks of DeafBlind adults in the U.S. We recently broadened the scope of this work to ask how the system changes as it is acquired by DeafBlind children, and what conditions must be in place in the child’s environment to facilitate that process. Last year, we spent four months with a larger team of collaborators collecting data. This year we will begin analyzing that data in order to test some key predictions and hopefully shed new light on the nature of language, and how new languages emerge.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
Interactions are, generally speaking, open-ended and un-predictable. I can’t promise anything specific.
Rachel Glennerster has established innovative, rigorous methods for understanding and evaluating programs aimed at addressing global poverty. Her work has provided important methodological and substantive insights on questions of health policy, economic development, democratic governance and women’s empowerment in developing countries. In addition, she studies policies aimed to promote political development and democratization in developing countries. Among other projects, she has worked with partners in Sierra Leone over a number of years to formulate and evaluate policies aimed to promote democratic decision making and civic participation. Prior to joining UChicago, she served as the Chief Economist for the Department for International Development. This position followed on an eminent career of engagements in international policy, including appointments at the International Monetary Fund and the UK Treasury. In addition, for over a decade, Glennerster has led the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at MIT. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development. Glennerster completed her undergraduate degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and her masters and doctorate in Economics at Birkbeck College.
Mary Hicks’ research on the history of slavery and emancipation in the African diaspora focuses on early modern Brazil, West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade. She is currently completing her manuscript, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835 (University of North Carolina Press) which is based on her award-winning dissertation. Her next project explores the relationship between gender, race, slavery and sexuality in the early modern Atlantic world. Her work has been published in the Journal of Global Slavery, Slavery & Abolition, The Many Faces of Slavery: New Perspectives on Slave Ownership and Experiences in the Americas (Bloomsbury), and 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (One World). She earned her PhD in Latin American history from the University of Virginia and her BA in History from the University of Iowa. She previously taught at Amherst College and was a fellow at Harvard University.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
This year, I will finalize my book, Captive Cosmopolitans which explores the relationship between slavery, cosmopolitanism, mobility and the making of modernity. A key theme of the work is the reliance of European imperial powers, especially Portugal, on the critical cultural, environmental and commercial knowledge of subaltern populations, like enslaved mariners from Africa. By exploring how capitalism evolved on the margins of this emergent world system, I hope to shed light on the legacies of this history for the modern world.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
In my courses students can look forward to delving into the increasingly rich scholarship on the history of slavery which has been produced in the last two decades. In the context of unprecedented levels of popular interest in the legacies of slavery, I hope to guide students in explorations of the key debates in the field (many of which have resonance for our lives today): the relationship--if any--between capitalist development and bondage, the connections between democracy and enslavement of African and indigenous peoples, the environmental transformations prompted by the expansion of plantation agricultural production.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
I love to be surrounded by art objects from my travels in Brazil. In addition to being pleasant to look, they also provide me with a sense of inspiration for my writing and teaching. I have West African textiles (similar to the kind I’ve written about in the context of the transatlantic slave trade to Bahia), beautiful black and white photography by a Brazilian artist demonstrating the vibrancy of Afro-Brazilian life and culture, and a tiny figurine of my “orixá” or Candomblé deity, Iansã, the goddess of storms, tempests and provocations. This piece is particularly meaningful, as I try to channel her indomitable energy--she is notorious for cutting through all obstacles in her path--a great metaphor for research!
Anne Karing’s research is on the intersection of development and behavioral economics. Since receiving her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019, she has been an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, as well as a visiting researcher at Stockholm University.
Emily Kern is a historian of science, with a specialty in the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the life sciences. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current book project, The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, explores how the African continent became the “cradle of humankind” and the pre-eminent site for human evolutionary research that it is today. Kern earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Princeton University in 2018. Her dissertation won the 2019 DHST dissertation prize from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Before coming to Chicago, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
Beyond the history of paleoanthropology and human origins, I’m interested in the history of radiometric dating and geochronology—how scientists have approached the problem of telling time on really big scales, or across different temporal domains, such as bridging the scalar gap between geological time and human cultural time. Because dating and deep time measurements bring together practitioners from multiple scientific disciplines—geology, archaeology, nuclear physics—studying this history helps shed new light on how researchers negotiate practical and epistemic differences in the making of new kinds of scientific knowledge.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
The great thing about the history of science is that it gives us tools and perspectives to understand the broader picture of scientific knowledge production and what its stakes are or have been. I’m looking forward to getting to work with engaged, curious students, and being a part of the rigorous intellectual community on campus.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
A few years ago, my sister gave me a plush toy salmon as a gift, which unexpectedly turned out to be the perfect size and weight to hold open delicate journals and books without damaging the pages. I keep it on my desk as an all-purpose book prop and paperweight—plus, it’s a great conversation starter.
Yuan Chang Leong's research aims to understand the neural and computational mechanisms underlying motivationalinfluences on human cognition. How do goals, desires and needs shape how people perceive and respondto the physical and social world? Are people inherently biased to see what they want to see? Why does the same news footage elicit strong yet opposing responses from people with different political beliefs? Research in his lab examines questions like these using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computational modeling, psychophysics, physiological measures, eye-tracking, and naturalistic task paradigms. He received his A.B. in Psychology from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. He then completed his postdoctoral training at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley before joining UChicago.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
Why does the same news footage elicit strong yet opposing responses from people with different political beliefs? One possibility is that the same words or sentences can have a different meaning for different individuals. For example, the sentence "we must keep our communities safe" might mean something different for conservatives and liberals. In the coming year, I hope to combine behavioral experiments and natural language processing methods to understand how the same messages are interpreted differently by opposing sides of the political spectrum.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
I'll be teaching Social Psychology this Fall. I have been having a lot of fun planning the syllabus, and I hope the students will enjoy the course as well.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work
Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless noise-cancelling headphones. I often listen to free-to-air radio channels from Singapore (where I grew up) while I work. Besides the reminder of home, the 13-hour time difference also means that it's the middle-of-the-night in Singapore when I'm working, so I get to listen with minimal ads and interruptions.
Ken Moss studies modern Jewish politics, culture and thought in the age of the nation. His work traces how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade or recast across the 20th century from Russia and Poland to Palestine and Israel—and what happened to Jews in the process. His acclaimed first book, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (2009) examined the triumph and tragedy of bids for Yiddish and Hebrew cultural renaissance amidst total war and revolution. Recovering bold artistic creativity and nation-building undone by violence and repression, Jewish Renaissance demonstrated the intensity of Jewish engagement with the liberal ethos of culture and art as vehicles of freedom, and the surprisingly deep impact of that ethos on Jewish nationalism. This autumn, Harvard University Press will publish Moss’ second book. An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, which traces how pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community reckoned with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises and the problem of choice under conditions of powerlessness and danger. He was previously the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
One of my wife’s college roommates got me a poseable plastic action figure of the Golem from the 1915 German silent film. For some reason, it’s wearing a pentagram, which really doesn’t make much sense ethnographically; also, over the years both arms have snapped off. But that’s a virtue: an armless golem has come to seem to me a disturbingly apt symbol for a lot of the history I write about.
In which section of the library do you enjoy being in the most? Why?
PJ5053 and PJ5129: Hebrew and Yiddish poetry and fiction. I have to admit it: deep down sometimes I’m sorry that I became a historian of the Jewish past rather than a student of Jewish literature. The historian is obligated to try to understand the past as it was, and this ultimately means that we have to approach every expression of past creativity, no matter how exalted, in terms of its limiting conditions – the factors that determined the limits of what could be thought and said, the factors that constrained what could be thought and said at that time in that place. When I read Yiddish or Hebrew poetry not as a historian, but just as a reader, I’m moved and transported in a way that is completely unlike the experience of dutifully interpreting a source in context. I know that my literature colleagues are beset by all kinds of self-imposed duties and doubts too; nobody gets to read completely naively, for pleasure, except children. But still, I bet my literature colleagues wouldn’t say they enjoy being in DS153 (Jewish history) more than any other section of the library.
If you could invite three specialists in your field (living or otherwise) to dinner, who would you choose – and what would you talk about?
1)I’d invite the late, great Jonathan Frankel, author of a truly extraordinary (though also gigantic and forbidding) work called “Prophecy and Politics.” “Prophecy and Politics” is a jaw-droppingly erudite, brilliant study of how Russian Jewish political thought was recast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries between the magnetic poles of Zionism and socialism; what Professor Frankel showed was that Zionism and Jewish socialism were part of a single “new Jewish politics” defined by the utterly unprecedented conviction that Russia’s Jewish community had it in its power to shape its own fate if it organized itself and acted collectively according to the correct ideology. It turns out that such hopes about Jewish agency were profoundly inflated, alas. But most history is the history of failure, in any event. “Prophecy and Politics” has shaped my work more than any other book, I think, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to tell Professor Frankel something to that effect before he passed away.
2)Josephus, the great Judean-turned-Roman historian of Judea in the age of Roman imperial power. Plying him with good Italian or Israeli wine, I’d get him to tell the whole story about becoming the most famous turncoat in Mediterranean antiquity, and also to clarify whether the Essenes and the Qumran sect were the same bunch or not.
3)Hannah Arendt: reading her essays in “The Jew as Pariah” at a college hockey game was what convinced me to study Jewish history professionally. I’m not kidding. Since then, I’ve read her over and over again. She makes me gnash my teeth so much I’ve probably worn them down, but just when I think I’ve really had enough of her grand empty gestures about political responsibility and choice, her willful empirical mistakes about every history she engages, and her perverse misallocations of blame, I find myself stopped in my tracks by another extraordinary and almost prophetic insight into our present condition.
Molly Offer-Westort works on quantitative methodology for social science research, with a focus on causal inference and experimental design. Offer-Westort’s PhD is joint in Political Science and Statistics & Data Science, from Yale University in 2019. She also holds a Masters in Statistics from Yale, and a Masters in Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Before joining UChicago, Offer-Westort was a postdoctoral fellow in Susan Athey’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her undergraduate degree was in cultural anthropology from Grinnell College; after college, she spent a year in Lesotho, teaching high school students, and two years in Madagascar, as a Peace Corps volunteer.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
My current work is on adaptive experimental designs and their applications in the social sciences. These types of designs can help us quickly decide among many alternative options, determining which types of programs work best and for whom. I’m currently using adaptive experimental designs in a project with co-authors to find out what types of behavioral nudges are most effective at curbing the spread of misinformation online.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
I’m really looking forward to getting to know University of Chicago students, and hearing what they’re passionate about. Students can look forward to having conversations with me about what they think are the big research questions of the day, and how they would like to see them addressed.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
I love talking with people when they stop by my office, but I also love my noise cancelling headphones—I have never been someone who could work in coffee shops or busy places, so I appreciate being able to find quiet concentration.
Jon Rogowski’s research interests are in American politics, where he studies representation and accountability, political institutions, and American political history. His current research projects study the growth of bureaucratic institutions and the use of presidential power in the contemporary and historical periods. He regularly teaches courses on presidential and congressional elections, the American presidency, executive branch politics, and research methods. Rogowski received his PhD in political science from UChicago in 2012. Before returning to Chicago, he held faculty positions in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and the Department of Government at Harvard University.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
Using administrative records on historical employment patterns in the federal bureaucracy, I hope to make progress on studying how patronage affected bureaucratic performance. Patronage occupies a central role in accounts of nineteenth and twentieth century political parties in the US, and I am in interested in understanding how control over patronage positions affected the distribution of public and private goods.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
I aim to be accessible and supportive while encouraging students to think big and take risks. Not only do students impress me by what they accomplish when they set their sights high, but they also impress themselves!
Joseph Root studies Market and Mechanism Design, Microeconomic Theory, and Behavioral Economics. His research focuses on identifying unifying mathematical features for resource allocation among individuals or groups, in order to increase the scope of applications for market design. Prior to joining the faculty at UChicago, Root was a postdoctoral fellow at the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory at Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and an M.A. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley. He also received a BA in Applied Mathematics and Economics at UC Berkeley.
Esteban Rossi-Hansberg considers the spatial properties of economic growth in terms of both the within-country and international dynamics of the spatial organization of economic activity. His 2018 Journal of Political Economy paper, The Geography of Development, offers a novel framework incorporating the barriers that impede workers from migrating, and distinguishing positive reasons for staying in place from barriers to leaving. His contributions to the study of international trade are equally significant.
In addition to these lines of research, Rossi-Hansberg has made important contributions to the study of organizations, with a focus on variations in knowledge in organizational hierarchies and the implications of knowledge asymmetries for labor economics and international trade.
He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and has received the August Lösch Prize, and the Geoffrey J. D. Hewings Award, among others. Previously the Theodore A. Wells Professor of Economics at Princeton University, he joined UChicago in July 2021. He is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, having earned his doctorate in economics in 2002 under the advising of Nobel laureate Robert Lucas.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
I am currently working on understanding the way climate change will affect individuals across regions of the world. The answer to this question depends, of course, on individual behavioral responses. As some areas get warmer, will agents migrate, will they change specialization and produce and trade a different set of goods, will companies invest and develop new cities in areas that are less (or even positively) affected? The ability of agents to react to this phenomenon allows them to adapt and avoid some of its negative implications. The new economic organization and distribution across space that it will generate will entail challenges and opportunities. I am trying to understand what they are by introducing climate change into detailed models of the distribution of economic activity in space.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
Some of my best work in the last few years has been coauthored with graduate students. In contrast with other fields, particularly the natural sciences, this is not as common in economics. This is unfortunate. In my view, working closely with graduate students on joint projects is not only fun, but very useful for everyone. Graduate students get a crash course in how to write a paper as well as direct access to faculty members, while faculty get coauthors that are eager and very motivated. I am, however, a bit tough. I can be very meticulous and pedantic with details. So, my students do need a lot of patience, grit, and endurance.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
I have a painting and several objects in my office. They have been with me since the beginning of my academic career (I am still setting up my office at UChicago, though). The painting is a somewhat abstract rendition of a still life. It is beautiful in a sense, but by now is more its companionship, its ability to capture my sight while I am thinking, that makes it special for me. Something similar happens with the objects. They are a collection of small objects, a fossil, an egg shaker, a spinning top, that allow me to concentrate while fidgeting with them.
Anton Strezhnev is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on the development and application of quantitative methods to social science problems. He is particularly interested in new methods for causal inference in observational settings, focusing on developing improved designs for estimating the effects of time-varying treatments. Substantively, his research studies international organizations, the empirical analysis of law, and the governance of global trade and investment.
What is one significant research question you hope to advance this year?
One of the projects I've been excited about for the last few years has been a collaborative effort studying leases and evictions with my colleague Dave Hoffman at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. We've been lucky to get access to a really comprehensive dataset on Philadelphia landlord-tenant court proceedings and, for many of the eviction cases, the underlying leases. We're hoping to get a better understanding of the factors that explain variation in the types of leases that tenants sign -- particularly when it comes to provisions that give landlords greater power or flexibility -- and whether this variation connects to outcomes in landlord-tenant court. What we've found so far really seems to emphasize tenant access to the court as a major barrier to justice. A large share of cases end up being decided in favor of the landlord simply because the tenant doesn't show up - we've found that something as simple as commuting distance to the court explains some of the variation in these "default" judgments. Even after controlling for other relevant factors, tenants who live further away from the court and have a longer time to commute are more likely to fail to show up. So we're excited to try to understand this relationship a bit more and see what factors seem to moderate or accentuate it along with thinking through possible reforms to the landlord-tenant court process that could help improve access.
What can students look forward to in their interactions with you?
I think students can expect a real excitement for research and for involving students in the research process at all levels. One of the most important experiences I had as an undergraduate was working as a research assistant. At the time that I started I really didn't know much about quantitative social science, but the process of getting to work directly with data and discovering genuinely new answers to difficult question was a really valuable one and motivated me to pursue a career in the field.
Describe one object you have in your office that helps you in your work.
I keep a small old-timey toy gyroscope that was a gift from a colleague. It doesn't necessarily help with my work, but it's a wonderful little distraction while waiting for code to run.