Former Senior Fellows

Despina Alexiadou

Despina is a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and received her PhD from the European University Institute.

Her research explores the process of policymaking in democracies and spans comparative political systems, executives, ministerial careers, comparative and international political economy.

Despina worked at the Cluster until the end of November 2020. Learn more about Despina on her website.

Lucy Barnes

Lucy Barnes is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at University College London.

Her research focuses on the politics of economic policy in western post-industrial democracies, with a particular emphasis on the politics of public finance (taxation, austerity, and government budget balance), redistribution, and inequality.

Lucy's stay at the Cluster ended in February 2020. Find out more about Lucy on her website.

Timothy Bartley

Timothy Bartley is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published articles on social movements, regulation, and transnational fields in numerous prestigious journals.

His 2018 book, Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy, was published by Oxford University Press. Tim’s research focuses on inequality and accountability in global production networks.

Tim stayed at the Cluster until July 2020. Learn more about Tim on his department website.

Michael Becher

Michael Becher is Assistant Professor for Political Science at the IE School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid.

Michael’s main fields of research are in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on the functioning of democracy, the interplay between economic and political inequality, accountability and representation, and political institutions. Find out more about Michael.

Nils-Christian Bormann

Nils-Christian Bormann is a political scientist in the Department of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Witten/Herdecke University. He is affiliated with the Identity & Conflict Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his research, Nils investigates how we can reduce political instability in the form of civil wars and democratic breakdown. At the Cluster, Nils investigated how government coalitions in Indian states affect economic inequality between ethnic groups. Find out more about Nils-Christian Bormann on his website.

Peter Thisted Dinesen

Peter Thisted Dinesen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

His work centers on the formation of social and political attitudes. A key topic in his work has been to understand the consequences of immigration-induced ethnic diversity for social trust and attitudes towards immigrants.

Peter stayed at the cluster until the end of November 2020. Learn more about Peter on his website.

Dietmar Fehr

Dietmar Fehr is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Heidelberg. Previously, he worked at the University of Manheim, was Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Belin, and was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and Dartmouth College.

He is doing research in Political Economy, Inequality and Poverty, Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Development Economics. His research methods are applied microeconomics, laboratory experiments and survey design.

Christina Felfe de Ormeño

Christina Felfe is a Full Professor and Head of the Chair of Economics at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Her research interest lies in the fields of Labor, Education and Migration Economics.

All her research projects aim at explaining socioeconomic inequalities, in particular gender gaps and disparities between people with and without migration background. A particular focus of her work lies on the role of social norms and preferences in preventing existing inequalities to close.

Aina Gallego

Aina Gallego is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and a Research Associate at Institut de Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals and the Institute of Political Economy and Governance. She works in the areas of political behavior and political economy.

She is interested in the political consequences of automation and digitalization on political behavior. She also investigates how the individual characteristics of politicians affect the issues they choose to discuss and the public policies they implement in office.

Aina Gallego will come to the cluster again in 2022. Find out more about Aina on her website.

David Garcia

David Garcia is a Professor of Social and Behavioural Data Science at the University of Konstanz and a Faculty Member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He has been a member of the Centre for Human | Data | Society since October 2022.

David studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and ETH Zürich, where he obtained his habilitation in Computational Social Sciences in 2018. His research focuses on understanding human behavior through digital traces and using computational modeling to analyze social media networks and their societal impacts, including data privacy and inequality.

David stayed at the Cluster until the end of September 2024. Learn more about David here.

Nathalie Giger

Nathalie Giger is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva. Previously, she worked at various universities in Switzerland and Germany.

In her research, she studies processes of political opinion formation and is interested in questions of the interplay between citizens and political elites, especially inequality in representation. She has published numerous journal articles on this topic.

Natalie worked at the Cluster until the end of January 2023. Learn more about Natalie on her website.

Mazen Hassan

Mazen Hassan is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Cairo University, Egypt. He is interested in explaining political and socio-economic behaviour in the Middle East using experimental and survey methodology.

His research topics include social norms, pro-social behaviour, parliamentary politics, electoral and party systems. His research project at the cluster focuses on the underrepresentation of constituents from underprivileged socio-economic background in the legislative budgeting process. Learn more about Mazen here.

Mans Hulden

Mans Hulden is an Associate Professor in the department of Linguistics and a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

His work in computational linguistics focuses on the development of foundational natural language processing technologies, often working with minority languages and languages with limited available digital resources. His research at the Cluster centered on collecting multiple measures of digital vitality across the minority languages spoken in Europe.

Mans' stay at the cluster ended in December 2021. Learn more about Mans on his deparment website.

Herbert Kitschelt

Herbert Kitschelt is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He has published on political preference formation, party organization, party competition and voter alignments in Western Europe, Post-communist Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and on clientelistic linkage mechanisms in global comparison.

He is particularly interested in the interface between electoral politics and political economy. Learn more about Herbert here.

Nevena Kulic

Nevena Kulic is a quantitative sociologist who studies inequality, particularly related to families, education, and gender. She is an adjunct professor in the School of Economics and Management at the University of Florence.

In her research, Nevena is interested in social stratification, educational inequality, women in the labour market and education, intra-household dynamics, and adult and child well-being.

Nevena stayed at the Cluster until the end of May 2020. Find out more about Nevena on her website.

Staffan Kumlin

Staffan Kumlin is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on comparative political behaviour, public opinion, and democracy in European welfare steates.

His most recent book is "Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change: Democratic Linkage and Leadership Under Pressure" (Oxford UP, 2022). Kumlin also co-designed the "welfare state module" in the 2016 European Social Survey 2016. Learn more about Staffan here.

Anna Manzoni

Anna Manzoni is Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University.

Her current research interests include intergenerational support, youth transition to adulthood, inequalities in college access and labor market returns, and social mobility more broadly. Learn more about Anna here.

Stanislav Markus

Stanislav Markus is an Associate Professor of International Business at the University of South Carolina. His research in comparative political economy explores corporate political activity, CSR, property rights protection, populism, corruption, and institution building.

During his stay at the Cluster, he is focusing on the topic “Electoral Support for the Oligarchs in Developing Democracies”. Find more about Stanislav here.

Irene Menéndez González

Irene Menéndez González is an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at the IE School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University in Madrid.

Her research interest lies at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with special emphasis on the consequences of globalisation for economic and social policy, as well as welfare states and interest representation in Europe and Latin America. Learn more about Irene here.

Chris Reed

Chris Reed is Full Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee, as well as founder and head of the Centre for Argument Technology.

His research focuses on the theory, practice, and commercialization of Argument Technology: AI applications that help to analyze, improve and teach debates and discussions in political, academic and commercial fields.

Chris stayed at the Cluster until July 2020. Learn more about Chris on his website.

Merlin Schaeffer

Merlin Schaeffer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He researches the political consequences of increasing ethnic diversity, segregation, and inequality in immigrant societies.

He is primarily concerned with capturing and analyzing misperceptions of the extent of ethnic discrimination. His research on this topic is based on economic confidence games and survey experiments.

Thomas Soehl

Thomas Soehl is Associate Professor of Sociology at McGill University and holds the Canada Research Chair in International Migration.

His research examines the socio-political attachments of migrants, the ways host societies transform migrants, and how migration challenges modern nation-states. Learn more about Thomas Soehl on his department website.

Frederick Solt

Frederick Solt is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His interests include comparative political behavior and political economy from a cross-national perspective.

Much of his work focuses on understanding how—and why—the extent of economic inequality in a country shapes the attitudes and behavior of the people who live there. Learn more about Frederick Solt on his department website.

Meghan Sumner

Meghan Sumner is Associate Professor of Phonetics at Stanford University. Her work investigates sound patterns in languages, their variation, and patterns of use.

She examines the social meanings people attach to these patterns and how this social information affects attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension. Find out more about Meghan here.

Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye

Mulugeta is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He received his PhD in Psycholinguistics from Leiden University in 2017, focusing on speech production in Konso, a Cushitic language.

His research covers psycholinguistics, speech-language processing, sociolinguistics, and language policy.

Mulugeta stayed at the Cluster from July to October 2024. Learn more about Mulugeta here.

Kris-Stella Trump

Kris-Stella Trump is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. Before starting at the University of Memphis, she worked at the Social Science Research Council and at the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the US federal government.

Kris-Stella’s research focuses on the political psychology of income differences and (re)distribution. She is interested in how perceptions of economic differences form, and how attitudes toward inequality and redistribution change.

Kris-Stella stayed at the Cluster until the end of December 2020. Learn more about Kris-Stella on her website.

Simon Weschle

Simon Weschle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University. He studies democratic representation and accountability, and factors that impede it.

His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, among others. Find out more about Simon on his Website.

Mara A. Yerkes

Mara A. Yerkes is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University.

Her research centers on comparative social policy and social inequalities, with a focus on policies developed by welfare states, industrial relations actors, and local government and the inequalities these policies intend to address.

Mara was working at the Cluster in early summer 2022. Find more about Mara here.