People

Director

David Skarbek

Associate Professor, Political Science

david_skarbek@brown.edu

Website

David Skarbek is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His research seeks to understand how extralegal governance institutions form, operate, and evolve. He has published extensively on the informal institutions that govern life in prisons in California and around the globe. His work has appeared in leading journals in political science, economics, and criminology, including in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, and Journal of Criminal Justice. His book, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (Oxford University Press), received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 William H. Riker Award for the best book in political economy in the previous three years. It was also awarded the 2014 Best Publication Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association’s 2014 Ethnography Award. His work has been featured widely in national and international media outlets, such as the Atlantic, BBC, Business Insider, the Economist, Forbes, the Independent, and the Times. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University in 2010.
Melvin Rogers

Associate Director, Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Associate Professor Political Science

melvin_rogers@brown.edu

https://www.melvinrogers.site

Melvin Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He has wide-ranging interests in contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political thought. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). He is the editor of John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Turner) of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a collection of 30 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thought. His articles appear in major academic journals and popular venues such as Dissent, the Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review. Professor Rogers now serves as the co-editor of Oxford University Press' New Histories of Philosophy series. The series focuses on the unattended resources in the history of philosophy.

He received an M.Phil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2006.

PPE Professors

Ryan Doody

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brown University

ryan_doody@brown.edu

http://rdoody.com/

Ryan Doody is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. Previously he held positions at the University of San Diego, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Groningen, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ryan received his PhD in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work deals with questions of rationality and value. He has a specialism in decision theory. Ryan's current research focuses on incommensurability, social risk, and public policy.
Emily Skarbek

Associate Professor, Research, Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Research Seminar

emily_skarbek@brown.edu

Website

Emily Skarbek is Associate Research Professor in the Political Theory Project at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University in 2009. Her research examines civil society, governance, and history of economic thought. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Public Choice, Journal of Institutional Economics, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Gordon Tullock prize for best article published in Public Choice by a junior scholar. She is also a contributing author to several books including After Katrina: The Political Economy of Disaster and Community Rebound and Hayek and the Modern World.
Gianna Englert

PPE Center Visiting Scholar, Assistant Professor, Political Science, Southern Methodist University

gianna_englert@brown.edu

http://www.giannaenglert.com/

Gianna Englert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches political theory and the history of political thought. She holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis and a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Political Theory Project at Brown University. She has research interests in the history of liberalism, with particular interests in themes of political inclusion and exclusion, citizenship, and political economy. Her work has been published in Political Theory, Polity, The Review of Politics, Modern Intellectual History, and The Tocqueville Review. Her book, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and The Politics of Suffrage, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

PPE Center Postdoctoral Fellows, 2022

Pawel Charasz

PPE Center Postdoctoral Research Associate, Pawel Charasz, PhD, Political Science, Duke University

Pawel Charasz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, political economy, and economic history, with a geographic focus on Central and Eastern Europe. In his work, Pawel studies the long-run effects of institutions and political processes on economic and political development, with an emphasis on cities and municipalities. His dissertation explores the role of historical city charters in promoting development. Pawel’s work has been published in European Union Politics and received the SAGE Award for the Best Article Published in EUP in 2021. His research has been supported by, among others, the Economic History Association, and the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University. Pawel has graduated with a BSc in Economics from Tilburg University, an MSc in International Political Economy from Nanyang Technological University, and an MA in Economics from Duke University.
Emilie Sartre

PPE Center Postdoctoral Research Associate, Emelie Sartre, Ph.D., Economics, CREST

Emilie earned her Ph.D. in Economics at CREST-ENSAE and visited the Department of Economics at Harvard University. She earned her B.A. in Economics and Sociology from Pantheon-Sorbonne University before receiving her M.A. in Economics from ENSAE, Ecole Polytechnique and Sciences Po Paris. Her research lies at the intersection of public economics and political economy, with a particular focus on political representation, extremism and partisan segregation. Her work has been presented at several international conferences, including NBER Political Economy Program Meeting, CEPR, CESifo, Royal Economic Society Conference, among others.
Jessie Trudeau

PPE Center Postdoctoral Research Associate, Ph.D., Department of Government, Harvard University

Jessie's research interests include political economy of development, policing, crime, corruption, and clientelism. Her book project, Machine Gun Politics: Why Politicians Cooperate with Organized Crime, explains why politicians and criminal organizations cooperate peacefully, drawing from a mixed-methods study of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her scholarship has won awards at the American Political Science Association (APSA), Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and Public Choice Society, and has been published in World Development and Economia. Jessie's research has been generously supported by the Corporación Andino de Fomiento (CAF), Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), Harvard Brazil Cities Initiative, and the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative (FHB). Jessie received her PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2022 and will begin a position as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2023.