2023 PRIZE WINNERS:
Emily Rains (@_emilyrains), is an incoming Assistant Professor of International Development at Tulane University and a former Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University. She studies urban politics in developing countries, focusing on how living and working in informal spaces shapes political beliefs and behaviors. Within this area, she is particularly interested in explaining gender gaps in political responses to urban informality and uses original quantitative and qualitative data within Indian “slums”. The EGEN prize will help develop a project on women’s informal leadership within urban slum areas and fund upcoming fieldwork in India, specifically in Patna and Bangalore.
Angie Torres-Beltran (@angietorresbel), is a PhD candidate at Cornell University who studies gender, violence, and political participation in Latin America (specifically Mexico) and the US, with a particular focus on state-society relations and justice. Her research uses a multi-method analysis of Mexico, based on both quantitative and qualitative data from field research, including new municipal level data on crime reports and women’s electoral participation and interviews with both bureaucrats and civil society organizations across Mexico. The EGEN prize will fund archival research and an extension of her survey in Mexico.
Myles Williamson (@myles_sage), is a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama who studies the effect of regime type and religion in the advancements of transgender rights cross nationally. Williamson’s project, “A Global Analysis of Transgender Rights: Introducing the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP),” introduces a measure of transgender rights worldwide from 2000 to 2021, disaggregating data on the “LGBT” community. The paper argues that aggregation neglects the policies and concerns unique to transgender individuals, potentially misrepresenting the protections countries afford these minorities. The EGEN prize will fund summer research and travel to APSA.
Honorable Mentions: We also want to acknowledge the work of six other scholars –Emily Myers, (PhD candidate, Duke University), Sara Morell (PhD candidate, University of Michigan), Maya Novak-Herzog (PhD candidate, Northwestern University, Ari Ray (Postdoc and Senior Lecturer, University of Geneva), Anirvan Chowdhury (PhD candidate, University of California Berkeley) and Camila Páez-Bernal (Ph.D. candidate, Arizona State University) – for their outstanding projects.
You can read more about the winners' projects here.
Angie Torres-Beltran (@angietorresbel), is a PhD candidate at Cornell University who studies gender, violence, and political participation in Latin America (specifically Mexico) and the US, with a particular focus on state-society relations and justice. Her research uses a multi-method analysis of Mexico, based on both quantitative and qualitative data from field research, including new municipal level data on crime reports and women’s electoral participation and interviews with both bureaucrats and civil society organizations across Mexico. The EGEN prize will fund archival research and an extension of her survey in Mexico.
Myles Williamson (@myles_sage), is a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama who studies the effect of regime type and religion in the advancements of transgender rights cross nationally. Williamson’s project, “A Global Analysis of Transgender Rights: Introducing the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP),” introduces a measure of transgender rights worldwide from 2000 to 2021, disaggregating data on the “LGBT” community. The paper argues that aggregation neglects the policies and concerns unique to transgender individuals, potentially misrepresenting the protections countries afford these minorities. The EGEN prize will fund summer research and travel to APSA.
Honorable Mentions: We also want to acknowledge the work of six other scholars –Emily Myers, (PhD candidate, Duke University), Sara Morell (PhD candidate, University of Michigan), Maya Novak-Herzog (PhD candidate, Northwestern University, Ari Ray (Postdoc and Senior Lecturer, University of Geneva), Anirvan Chowdhury (PhD candidate, University of California Berkeley) and Camila Páez-Bernal (Ph.D. candidate, Arizona State University) – for their outstanding projects.
You can read more about the winners' projects here.
2022 PRIZE WINNERS:
Bhumi Purohit @bhumipurohit, a PhD student at UC Berkeley and rising assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, studies gender and comparative politics in India. Her paper “Bureaucratic Resistance Against Female Politicians: Evidence from Telangana, India” argues that bureaucrats often drag their feet on implementing the policies favored by women politician. Gender bias – the belief that women in politics are less effective and competent – combined with career incentives – where men instead of women appear more important for bureaucrats’ future success – each serve to depress the delivery of crucial public services demanded and fought for by women. The EGEN prize will allow Purohit to spend additional time in the field, conducting interviews, focus groups, and shadowing of legislators that will deepen the qualitative insights from this important research.
Sumin Lee @sumin_s_lee is a PhD student at Rutgers University, USIP Peace Scholar and rising ACES Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School at Texas A&M. She studies International Relations with a focus on sexual violence and domestic accountability surrounding armed group conflict. Her paper “Gender Justice for Whom: Strategic Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence” presents analyses of an original dataset on domestic accountability for wartime sexual violence in conflict-affected African states between 1998 and 2018. This is the first data set that focuses solely on justice mechanisms adopted in response to sexual violence and that comprehensively documents the different accountability mechanisms, from legislative to judicial. The EGEN prize will help push the project’s mixed-methods components in fruitful directions.
Melina Much (@melina__much) is a PhD student in political science at UC Irvine who studies American Politics and Methodology. Her dissertation interrogates the way that the concept of intersectionality has been used to study marginalization, and uses Bayesian multilevel modeling and machine learning techniques to assess how attention to gender, race, and class would change the qualitative and quantitative outcomes of previous studies. Other work in the realm of data justice asks how “big data” and conversations about the fairness of algorithms do not adequately account for long-term and systemic inequality. The EGEN prize will help push the idea of non-additive models of identity further.
Honorable Mentions: We also want to acknowledge the work of three other scholars – , Nirvikar Jassal (rising Assistant Professor of Political Science, LSE), Elizabeth Brannon (rising Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University) and Rithika Kumar (PhD student in political science, University of Pennsylvania) – for their outstanding projects.
Sumin Lee @sumin_s_lee is a PhD student at Rutgers University, USIP Peace Scholar and rising ACES Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School at Texas A&M. She studies International Relations with a focus on sexual violence and domestic accountability surrounding armed group conflict. Her paper “Gender Justice for Whom: Strategic Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence” presents analyses of an original dataset on domestic accountability for wartime sexual violence in conflict-affected African states between 1998 and 2018. This is the first data set that focuses solely on justice mechanisms adopted in response to sexual violence and that comprehensively documents the different accountability mechanisms, from legislative to judicial. The EGEN prize will help push the project’s mixed-methods components in fruitful directions.
Melina Much (@melina__much) is a PhD student in political science at UC Irvine who studies American Politics and Methodology. Her dissertation interrogates the way that the concept of intersectionality has been used to study marginalization, and uses Bayesian multilevel modeling and machine learning techniques to assess how attention to gender, race, and class would change the qualitative and quantitative outcomes of previous studies. Other work in the realm of data justice asks how “big data” and conversations about the fairness of algorithms do not adequately account for long-term and systemic inequality. The EGEN prize will help push the idea of non-additive models of identity further.
Honorable Mentions: We also want to acknowledge the work of three other scholars – , Nirvikar Jassal (rising Assistant Professor of Political Science, LSE), Elizabeth Brannon (rising Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University) and Rithika Kumar (PhD student in political science, University of Pennsylvania) – for their outstanding projects.
The EGEN Prize Awards are generously supported by NSF grant #2215500