Hire a GW Ph.D.
In recent years, George Washington University has made a large investment in our department and its commitment to training graduate students for research and teaching careers. The individuals who are on the market this year reflect this commitment. As you will see, many of them have published in leading journals, presented papers at professional meetings, and secured a variety of fellowships and awards. We are confident that these ABDs and recent PhDs have bright political science futures. We hope you will consider hiring one of them. Please do not hesitate to contact Paul Wahlbeck, our director of graduate placement, at wahlbeck@gwu.edu or any of our faculty members if you have questions about any of our candidates.
On the Market (click name to see curriculum vita):
Alistair Howard (Ph.D., September 2004) studies comparative politics, international political economy, and US public policy. He has been teaching at Temple University as a visiting instructor since 2000, when he also began his doctoral research at George Washington University. He has taught a wide range of upper-level political science courses, as well as Temple University¹s modern civilization course. Prior to graduate school he was a policy analyst in Washington D.C. He studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University before coming to the United States. His dissertation evaluates political and economic factors conditioning British corporate governance. Specifically, he explains the distribution of power between investors, managers, employees and environmentalists. The British case is interesting because problems during the early 1990s anticipated those of the Enron/WorldCom after 2001, and because the 1997 Labour Government considered increasing the role of employees and environmentalists. Exploring change and continuity during this period tells us much about power in liberal market democracies. More information, including teaching evaluations, sample syllabi, and a draft of his dissertation is available at: http://astro.temple.edu/~alistair .
Mitchell Killian (Ph.D., May 2007) studies American politics and quantitative methods. His research focuses on political behavior, political psychology, public opinion, voting behavior, and judicial politics. His undergraduate degree in statistics, experience as an actuary, and focus on quantitative methods as a graduate student provide a solid methodological background for his research. He is currently working on four research papers, three of which are under review at peer-reviewed journals. His dissertation seeks to explain why individuals change their party identification. Specifically, why do citizens switch political parties (i.e., Democrats becoming Republicans and Republicans becoming Democrats)? Wanting to understand partisan change at the micro-level, his dissertation utilizes a number of panel datasets; some cover time periods as short as one year while others span up to fifteen years. He uncovers a number of interesting insights about the effects of ideology and issue attitudes, even when accounting for measurement error, on party switching. Even though he shows that ideology and attitudes on political issues affect party switching, his dissertation is also a confirmation of The American Voter’s premise that party identification is largely stable – even those with attitudes and ideology that are seemingly at odds with their partisanship are always more likely to remain identified with their party than to switch parties. Beyond his research on partisan change, he has obtained significant teaching experience at George Washington University as a teaching assistant for four semesters of American politics and one semester of the American Presidency. For dissertation chapters, articles, and additional information, visit his website at: http://home.gwu.edu/~mkillian
Michael MacLeod (Ph.D., January 2008) specializes in International Relations, with sub-field interests in international political economy, international organization and environmental politics. He is the 2008-2009 Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts & Science, Bentley College in Boston, MA, where he is conducting research and writing on the evolution and utility of socially responsible investment as an instrument of conditioning business power in global governance. Dr MacLeod's specific focus is on the use of shareholder activism to affect corporate behavior on the issues of human rights and climate change, which was a key focus of his dissertation "Forging Private Governance of Climate Change: The Power and Politics of Socially Responsible Investment."
