12 Women Academics Among the Inaugural Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has introduced its first cohort of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. The program is aimed at providing financial support for scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Each fellow selected will receive up to $200,000 which will enable them to take sabbaticals in order to concentrate on research and/or writing.

The inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows has 32 members. Fourteen of the new fellows are women. Among the women, two are journalists and 12 have current ties to the academic world. Here are brief biographies of the 12 women with academic affiliations who are among the Andrew Carnegie Fellows.

(L to R) Top row: Fotini Christia, Mala Htun, Valerie M. Hudson, Maria Ivanova, Sarah Mathew, and Leith Mullings. Bottom row: Louise Shelley, Patricia  L. Sullivan, Elizabeth F. Thompson, Zeynep Tufekci, Lynn Vavreck, and Elizabeth J. Wilson.

Fotini Christia is an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty at MIT in 2008. She is the author of Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Dr. Christia earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University in New York City and a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University.

Mala Htun is an associate professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. She joined the university’s faculty in 2011. Dr. Htun is the author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family Under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dr. Htun is a graduate of Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University.

Valerie M. Hudson holds the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 2012 after teaching for 24 years at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Dr. Hudson is the author of Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004). Professor Hudson is a graduate of Brigham Young University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University.

Maria Ivanova is an associate professor in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Ivanova is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in international environmental policy from Yale University.

Sarah Mathew is an assistant professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Before joining the faculty at Arizona State in 2013, she taught at Stony Brook University in New York. Dr. Mathew is a graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Mathew conducted postdoctoral research at the Center for the Study of Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Leith Mullings is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings is the editor of the book New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). She served as president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011 to 2013. Professor Mullings holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Louise Shelley holds the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair in Public Policy and is a University Professor in the School of Policy, Government and International Affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also the founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at the university. Her latest book is Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Professor Shelley is a graduate of Cornell University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Patricia  L. Sullivan is an associate professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined the faculty at the university in 2011 after teaching at the University of Georgia. Sullivan is the author of Who Wins? Predicting Strategic Success and Failure in Armed Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2012). Dr. Sullivan is a graduate of Santa Clara University in California. She holds a master’s degree from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis.

Elizabeth F. Thompson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Professor Thompson is the author of Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard University Press, 2013). Dr. Thompson holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree and a P.D. from Columbia University.

Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Tufekci holds bachelor’s degrees from Istanbul University and Bosphorus University, both in Turkey. She earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lynn Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the UCLA faculty in 2001. Dr. Vavreck is the author of The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 2009). She holds a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees from Arizona State University and earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester in New York.

Elizabeth J. Wilson is a professor in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. She has taught at the University of Minnesota since 2005. Dr. Wilson is the co-author of Smart Grid (R)Evolution: Electric Power Struggles (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor Wilson is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a master’s degree from Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium and a Ph.D. in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.