APSA congratulates the following APSA Diversity and Inclusion Program Alumni for their recent accomplishments and updates. The list of accomplishments and updates includes news on academic program admittances; dissertation defenses; academic, administrative and non-academic job appointments; publications; promotions and other professional updates. To learn more about APSA Diversity and Inclusion Programs visit us online at https://apsanet.org/DIVERSITY/Diversity-and-Inclusion-Programs.

Iris Acquarone (FLS 2023), PhD candidate at Rice University, accepted a Postdoc (to tenure-track) at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.

Austin Barraza (MFP 2019-20, FLS 2022), PhD candidate at Northeastern University and assistant professor of political science at San Diego Mesa College, was awarded a 2024 Summer Fellowship from the UC Davis Wheelhouse Center for Community College Leadership and Research.

Olivia Britton (DFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at Boston University, defended her dissertation titled “Unraveling the Threads of Refugee Movement: Navigating Resettlement in Spain, Italy, and Germany,” and successfully completed her PhD.

Sonya Chen (DFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at Princeton University, will join the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania as a Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2024-25 academic year. In July 2025, she will start as an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College.

Keith Chew (MFP 2019-20), PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, defended their dissertation, titled “The Political Economy of Legislative Diversity in Asia,” and will be joining Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies as a postdoctoral scholar in the fall of 2024.

Amber Colquhoun (DFP 2023-24), PhD student at the University of Maryland, received NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship this year and will receive three years of funding.

Melanie Fillmore (ARG 2023), PhD candidate at Boise State University, accepted a position as assistant professor of Sovereignty, Governance, and Policy in the Department of Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma.

LaGina Gause (RBSI 2009, MFP 2010-11), assistant professor at the University of California San Diego, earned tenure and was promoted to associate professor of political science at the University of California San Diego.

Julia Marin Hellwege (FLS 2020), associate professor at the University of South Dakota, was appointed the Director of the Chiesman Center for Democracy and the related endowed position, Professor of Democracy, at the University of South Dakota.

Kiara Hernandez (DFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at Harvard University, received a Stone Research Grant from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy for her dissertation research, “Hierarchy, Power, and Intergroup Tolerance in the New American Workplace.”

David Herrera (FLS 2022), PhD candidate at Brown University, accepted an assistant professor tenure track position in the School of the Environment at San Francisco State University starting fall 2024.

Briana Hyman (DFP 2020-21), teaching assistant professor at North Carolina A&T State University, successfully defended her dissertation, “What to the Puerto Rican is American Citizenship? How and Why the United States Continues to Disenfranchise Millions of Citizens” and graduated from Howard University in May of 2023. She taught at Elon University and North Carolina A&T State University in the 2022-2023 school year before accepting a teaching assistant professor position at A&T.

Rikio Inouye (DFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at Princeton University, won the Prize Fellowship in Social Sciences and an award for exemplary mentorship.

Jenn Jackson (MFP 2015-16), assistant professor at Syracuse University, published Black Women Taught Us.

Natalie Jones Kerwin (DFP 2023, ARG 2023), PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin Madison, published a co-authored article “Group Consciousness and the Politics of American Indians” in Political Behavior. She’s been approved for a major grant, the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. The project itself is titled: Engaging Wisconsin’s Native Americans in Social Science Research, and will serve as partial funding for her dissertation work. She will defend her prospectus in August.

Michelangelo Landgrave (MFP 2018-19, FLS 2019), assistant professor at the University of Colorado, made a lateral move from the University of Missouri to the University of Colorado.

Brianna Mack (RBSI 2011, MFP 2012-13), assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, published a co-authored article “Party Rocking: Exploring The Relationship between Music Preference, Partisanship, and Political Attitudes” in Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, The Media and The Arts with Teresa Martin and also published a co-authored essay "Pedagogical Pivots to Promote Inclusion in a Summer Bridge Program” in Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching with Dawn Chisebe, Phokeng Dailey, and Ashley Kennard.

Karla Magana (DFP 2021-22), PhD student at the University of Michigan, was named as a 2023 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow.

G. Agustin Markarian (ARG 2023), Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago, published “Racially Disparate Policy Responses to Mass Shootings,” which won best paper on Equity and Justice at the 2023 National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, and the State Politics and Policy Quarterly (SPPQ) Best Paper Award.

Jeremiah Muhammad (DFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, was awarded a yearlong predoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s (UIC) Freshwater Lab.

Oswaldo Mena Aguilar (FLS 2023), PhD Student at Graduate Center / City University of New York, published “Advocacy Coalitions or Pragmatic Coupling of Streams? Explaining Policy Change in Mexico: The Tax Reforms of Vicente Fox and Enrique Peña (2001 and 2013).” Policy Studies Journal Early View: 1-27. 2024.

Ariel Pitre Young (DFP 2022-23), Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the University of Sarajevo, is currently a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prior to her Fulbright grant, she earned her MA in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and has accepted a position as an academic advisor in the Government Department at UT Austin starting in July 2024.

Mariana V Ramirez Bustamante (FLS 2023), PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University, defended her dissertation and will start a postdoc position at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS) at Heidelberg University (Germany).

Tanika Raychaudhuri (MFP 2016-17), assistant professor at the University of Houston, will be starting a new position as assistant professor of political science at Rice University in July 2024, and is also part of a research team that won a British Academy “Knowledge Frontiers” Grant for an International Interdisciplinary Research Project called “Inter-Minority Coalition or Conflict? Identity Formation and Inter-Minority Relations between Asian and Black Communities in the UK and US.” (PI: Prof. Neema Begum, University of Nottingham).

Adolph Reed (MFP 1972-73), professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, published No Politics but Class Politics (ERIS/Columbia University Press) with co-author Walter Benn Michaels; received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; gave the Second Annual Judith Stein Lecture at CUNY Grad Center, New York and also gave the Second Annual Leo Panitch Lecture at the Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education, Toronto.

Jason Rivera (MFP 2009-10), associate professor of Public Management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was elected Chair of the Section on Emergency & Crisis Management (SECM) of the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA).

Melissa Rogers (ARG 2021), assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University, received the New Perspectives in Studies of American Governance Grant ($14,692 with Joseph Dietrich, Jean Schroedel) and the Public Agenda Project Democracy Renewal Project Grant ($50,000 with Joseph Dietrich, Jean Schroedel, Tessa Provins); and published “The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem in Political Science,” conditionally accepted in Political Analysis (with Dong Wook Lee, Hillel Soifer), “Decentralization and the Spatial Distribution of Infant Mortality in Less Developed Nations,” forthcoming in Regional Studies (with Pablo Beramendi, Soomin Oh), “Revisiting the Origins of Felony Disenfranchisement in the United States,” forthcoming in Studies in American Political Development (with Jean Schroedel, Joseph Dietrich, Blake Garcia) and “24 & Achieving Electoral Equity After Brnovich,” forthcoming in Social Science Quarterly (with Jean Schroedel, Joseph Dietrich, David Lindgren).

Sara Maaria Saastamoinen (ARG 2023), PhD student at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, was awarded the inaugural Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the International Studies Association for 2024-25. She was also selected as a fellow for the 2024 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities. Sara was also nominated for her university’s annual Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for a Graduate Assistant. Additionally, Sara’s ceramics work was selected by a panel of jurors for an upcoming exhibition in downtown Honolulu.

Sevastian Sanchez (RBSI 2023), Dual MA/MIA candidate at New York University, will be attending Columbia University this fall as a dual degree candidate studying international affairs at the SIPA school and Quantitative Methods for Social Science Research (QMSS) at the Graduate School.

Pyar Seth (RBSI 2019, DFP 2020-21), incoming postdoc at the University of Notre Dame, defended his dissertation “The Spectral Defect: Death, Diagnosis, and Determinism Across the Atlantic World” in May 2024. Starting fall 2024, he will be a postdoctoral research associate at the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame.

Cayleb Stives (DFP 2024-25), PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, will begin his doctoral program at the University of Colorado Boulder in fall 2024, and will have their co-authored chapter in the Research Handbook of Judicial Politics published in September 2024.

Angie Torres-Beltran (RBSI 2017, MFP 2018-19, FLS 2023), PhD candidate at Cornell University, beginning fall 2024 will be joining the department of political science at Michigan State University as a dean’s research associate (postdoctoral fellow to tenure-track assistant professor).

Angel Manuel Villegas Cruz (MFP 2020-21), PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University, co-authored “‘Reenviado Muchas Veces’: How WhatsApp Users in Mexico and Colombia Understand Political Information” in Political Communication; published “China and Its Small Neighbors: The Political Economy of Asymmetry, Vulnerability, and Hedging by Sung Chull Kim” in Pacific Affairs; has a forthcoming article “Nation Branding and COVID-19: An Empirical Investigation of Self-Reports of Medical Donations in Chinese Digital Diplomacy” in the Journal of East Asian Studies; and received the APSA Lee Ann Fujii Travel Grant in fall 2023.

Kenicia Wright (ARG 2023), assistant professor at Arizona State University, has a forthcoming publication with Austin McCrea and Xiaoyang Xu, titled, “Pathways for Social Equity: Bureaucratic Representation, Diversity Management, and Cultural Competency in Florida Nursing Homes” in the Journal of Social Equity and Public Administration. She also received the 2023 Western Political Science Association’s Latina/o Politics Best Paper Award with Gunes Tezcur.

Joanna Wuest (ARG 2022), assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, accepted a new position as assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University (SUNY), and published Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, & Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (University of Chicago Press 2023); “Agents of Scientific Uncertainty: Evidence and Expertise in Conflicts over Gender-Affirming Care Bans for Minors,” in Social Science & Medicine 344 (March 2024) with Briana S. Last; “Church Against State: How Industry Groups Lead the Religious Liberty Assault on Civil Rights, Healthcare Policy, and the Administrative State,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 52 (2024): 151-168 with Briana S. Last; “Queer Working-Class Politics: LGBTQ+ Advocacy in the US Labor Movement,” New Labor Forum (2024); and “Assuaging the Anxious Matriarch: Social Conservatives, Radical Feminists, and Dark Money Against Trans Rights,” in Feminism Against Cisness, ed. Emma Heaney (Duke University Press 2024).

Rafael Xucuru-Kariri (ARG 2023), Social Policies Analyst at the Federal University of Bahia, published “Indigenous Bem Viver: Teaching Material for Public Schools in the State of São Paulo, Brazil and is currently co-editing a book titled Vozes de Aby Yala along with Alessandra Seixlack.

Veronica Zebadua-Yanez (FLS 2021), assistant professor of comparative women’s studies at Spelman College, is a 2024-2025 visiting fellow at Emory University Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.