Perry World House Announces 6 Postdoctoral Fellows for 2019-20 Academic Year

Perry World House Announces 6 Postdoctoral Fellows for 2019-20 Academic Year

Philadelphia—Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s center for global policy engagement, has announced its 2019-20 postdoctoral fellows. Perry World House selected the new fellows based on a demonstrated track record of academic excellence and the policy relevance of their research. Each of the fellows will spend a year on campus, researching, writing, and connecting with the community.

“Perry World House’s postdoctoral fellows program is critical to our mission, allowing us to bring world-class scholars to Penn and promote their ground-breaking work to help practitioners address policy challenges,” said William Burke-White, Richard Perry Professor and Inaugural Director of Perry World House. “We expect big things from them during their time on campus and in the years ahead.”

The Perry World House postdoctoral fellows program not only brings new ideas to Penn but also reflects a commitment to expanding the pipeline of new scholars working on critical global issues. In addition to pursuing their own academic research, the fellows support the institution’s mission, including by serving as advisers for undergraduate fellows pursuing yearlong policy projects and helping to shape Perry World House colloquia and workshops.

The 2019-20 Perry World House Postdoctoral Fellows are:

Erik Lin-Greenberg

Erik Lin-Greenberg is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Columbia University and a Carnegie Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is currently examining how drones and other remote warfighting technologies affect crisis escalation, work that will continue at Perry World House. His research has appeared in a variety of academic and policy outlets including Security Studies, Journal of Peace Research, International Peacekeeping, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and The South China Morning Post. Lin-Greenberg previously served as an officer in the United States Air Force, where he led a 125-member intelligence team that supported conventional and special operations forces.

Lama Mourad

Lama Mourad is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto and pre-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She specializes in comparative politics and the politics of migration, with a regional focus on the Middle East. At Perry World House, Mourad will work on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, provisionally titled Open Borders, Local Closures: The Local Politics of Refugee Crisis. She will also advance two ongoing projects at the intersection of decentralization, local governance, and migration policy in the global South.  

Lauren Pinson

Lauren Pinson is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University. She studies the governance of cross-border illicit trafficking, particularly of drugs and small arms. At Perry World House, Pinson will work with Beth Simmons, the Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science and Business Ethics, on the Borders and Boundaries in World Politics project, which examines how political life both affects and is affected by international borders and border security policies. Prior to her graduate studies, Pinson spent three years as a senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Marianne F. Potvin 

Marianne F. Potvin is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and Architecture at Harvard University. She studies the nexus between humanitarian action, the politics of urban planning, and technology. During her time at Perry World House, Potvin will complete a series of articles on the transformation of the humanitarian project in relation to rapid urbanization and the impacts of technology. During her career, Potvin has contributed to international policy forums such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Annual Protection Dialogue, the UN-Habitat Informal Urbanism Hub, and the Design for Humanity Initiative.

Robert Shaffer

Robert Shaffer has a Ph.D. in Government and M.S. in Statistics and Data Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House and will be returning for this coming cohort. At Perry World House, Robert is working on the Borders and Boundaries project and studying variation in sentiment and framing of international borders across time and space, both in formal legal documents and in media sources. Shaffer’s work has appeared in Political Analysis, Cognitive Systems Research, and the Journal of Web Semantics. Outside the academy, he is affiliated with the Constitute project, and helped to develop an interactive exhibit on the content of national constitutions at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center.

Jonah Stuart Brundage

Jonah Stuart Brundage is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He uses the tools of historical sociology to study processes of global governance and international cooperation and conflict. At Perry World House, Brundage will develop his comparative analysis of the diplomatic services of eighteenth-century Britain and France into a book. He will also be working on a new research project that turns to the bases of global governance in the present day, with a focus on monetary policy and central banking. Brundage’s work has appeared in the American Sociological Review and Comparative Studies in Society and History.

For more on Perry World House’s 2019-20 Postdoctoral Fellows and its research and programming, please visit https://global.upenn.edu/perryworldhouse.

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