Emily Hencken Ritter
Emily Hencken Ritter is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, and she also serves as Director of the ROCCA Lab. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Emory University.
Professor Ritter’s research centers on the effects of international legal institutions on the strategic relationship between government repression and dissent activities, with particular attention to the methodological implications for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. Different projects contribute to scholarship on international human rights institutions, law, and practice; domestic conflict between national governments and groups from the population; international governance and legal institutions; institutional solutions to bargaining and cooperation problems, and political methodology. Game theory and quantitative statistical analysis are the primary methods she uses to approach inference.
Andrew J. Coe
Andrew J. Coe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Professor Coe received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.
Professor Coe has three ongoing research projects. The first seeks to assemble existing data on different foreign policy tools states use to wage their disputes—such as imposing sanctions, competing in arms races, and using force—into a unified database in order to understand how states choose among these tools and which states engage in the most conflictual behavior overall. The second focuses on understanding how other countries react to a state being suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons, from preventive attacks, to individual deals to stop nuclear weapons programs, to strengthening the nonproliferation regime. The third project investigates whether terrorism works, not from the perspective of the terrorists themselves, but from that of the civilians or foreign governments that support a terrorist organization.
Brett V. Benson
Brad V. Benson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Asian Studies Program at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Professor Benson was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science in 2010-2011. He was also a POSCO Visiting Fellow in residence at the East-West Center in Honolulu, HI in 2010.
Professor Benson’s research interests lie in the areas of international relations and Chinese politics and East Asian relations. He has worked on military alliances and interstate conflict and is the author of Constructing International Security: Alliances, Deterrence, and Moral Hazard (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
His current research focuses on the role of weapons systems in international politics. In particular, Professor Benson studies nuclear weapons and strategies countries use to reduce proliferation, the relationship between the sale of conventional weapons and military alliances, and the effects of small arms markets on intrastate conflicts.
Carwil Bjork-James
Carwil Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from City University of New York in 2013. His research agenda examines how subordinate social groups, particularly the urban poor and indigenous peoples, organize their own spaces and assertively use public spaces. It pursues a spatially aware ethnographic approach, interested in the practical and symbolic significance of urban places and indigenous territories, as well as a careful examination of the practices of social movements in sustained conflicts. Some broader issues of interest in his research are evolving ideas of collective rights (including the right to strike, and the rights of peasants and indigenous peoples), strategic and tactical questions in collective mass action, and the role of urban space in reproducing and challenging racial and state power.
James Bisbee
James Bisbee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate of the Data Science Institute at Vanderbilt University.Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and at Princeton’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.
He studies how public opinions and behaviors are influenced by information, ranging from local unemployment to elite cues, using all manner of empirical evidence. His research has been published in peer reviewed journals, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and International Organization, among others.