Idaho Society of Fellows | Post-doc Opportunities at University of Idaho

Speaker: Nwakanma will present research on gender and political behavior based on her book project, which investigates the social and economic forces shaping gender gaps in political representation. Her work builds on extensive research conducted in Nigeria, Africa's largest democracy. Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary insights and multi-method approaches, including rich ethnographic fieldwork, original survey analysis, and archival research, Dr. Nwakanma’s research deepens our understanding of the political economy of gender and development in Africa and beyond. The talk will also highlight some of the unwritten rules for succeeding in academia, offering students practical guidance for navigating an academic career.

Bio: Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California (UC) Irvine. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a secondary field in African and African American Studies from Harvard University.

Topic: Please join us for this public lecture exploring the personal family history of Emily Marker, Ph.D., whose Jewish grandparents benefited from Austria’s Holocaust reparations policy. Her grandfather, a talented Viennese composer, fled to France and was interned in various Vichy camps before successfully emigrating to the US. As both a descendant-beneficiary of reparations payments and a scholar of postcolonial Europe, Dr. Marker’s work considers future possibilities for a European reparations regime, particularly as it relates to slavery and other forms of colonial violence. Light refreshments will be provided.

Bio: Emily Marker is an Associate Professor of European and Global History at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research and teaching focus on imperial and postcolonial Europe, francophone Africa, global history, youth culture, and religion. She is the author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell, 2022) and is currently developing a project that merges her family’s personal history with Holocaust reparations and her scholarly interest in the postcolonial European reparations regime. Marker is the president of the Camden Chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and the Immediate Past President of the Western Society for French History.

Speaker: Policy makers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy. They use two shortcuts: emotions and beliefs to understand problems and “rational” ways of establishing the best evidence for solutions. Many studies only address improving the supply of evidence to help reduce scientific and policymaker uncertainty. However, policymakers also combine their beliefs with limited evidence to reduce ambiguity by choosing one of several possible ways to understand and solve a problem. Professor Wellstead discusses both approaches in the context of immigration policy.

Bio: Professor Wellstead is a Professor of Public Policy, Social Sciences. He joined the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University in 2011 after a 15-year career with the Canadian federal government. His professional experiences are focused in areas of public policy and public management. Research interests include investigating multi-level governance arrangements in the natural resource sector, measuring policy capacity and evidence-based policy-making, policy mechanisms, and theories of the policy process.

The Soviet Union and the United States are often said to have organized and done science quite differently from one another. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, some Soviet scientists began to position their science system as something fundamentally different from those of the “bourgeois”, “Western” countries. During the Cold War, Soviet and American science were often seen as being in conflict with one another, and both states placed a high value on scientific research. In spite of this, many Soviet and American scientists developed and maintained longstanding ties with one another, acting through correspondence, formal exchange programs, travel, and other means.

This panel aims to develop new perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and American scientists by highlighting the different types of connections that existed between them across the twentieth century. The presentations will consider various forms of contact, collaboration, and exchange, all of which constituted an important form of track-two scientific diplomacy. Specific topics that will be addressed include long-term individual contacts among scientists and the means through which they were maintained, a comparison of a Soviet scientist who moved to the US and an American who left for the Soviet Union, and debates and exchanges among Soviet and American encyclopedists over the future development of science, technology, and world culture.

Paul Rubinson

Topic: The Pursuit of Scientific Justice: Soviet and American Scientist Exiles in the 1930s

Bio: Paul Rubinson is Professor of History at Bridgewater State University. He was born in Baltimore, MD, and graduated with a BA from Vanderbilt University. He served as a Smith-Richardson predoctoral fellow at Yale University International Security Studies in 2007 and received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. His current research interests focus on the relationship between scientists and the development of human rights from the 1790s to the 1970s. He is the author of Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America, published in 2016 by the University of Massachusetts Press, as well as Rethinking the Antinuclear Movement, published in 2017 by Routledge. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and Cold War History as well as edited collections on the Cold War, science, and human rights from Routledge, Manchester University Press, and Oxford University Press.

Anna Doel

Topic: “Very Sincerely Yours”: Informal Contacts in the Scientific Cold War

Bio: Anna Doel is a historian of Cold War science. She holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota’s HSTM program and is now working on her first book discussing relationships between American and Soviet intellectual communities.

Michael Coates

Topic: Knowledge for a Technological Future: Exchanges and Debates among Soviet and American Encyclopedists in the Cold War

Bio: Michael Coates is a Postdoctoral Fellow in East European Studies with the Martin Institute and the Idaho Society of Fellows. Coates is a specialist in Soviet and Russian history, with a particular focus on the history of Soviet science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the history of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia aimed to reconstruct all of human knowledge in accordance with the principles of the Marxist philosophies of dialectical and historical materialism, becoming one of the most authoritative sources of knowledge in the Soviet Union. As a part of this and other projects (including one on the Encyclopædia Britannica during the Cold War), Coates has conducted extensive archival research in Russia and the United States.

Speaker: Dr. Safa Al-Saeedi 

Topic: Dr. Al-Saeedi will focus on how changes in access to media, including the cassette tape and the Internet, have affected the balance of power among Saudi liberal, reformist, and conservative elites in the context of their potential to influence policy reforms in select issue areas.

Bio: Safa Al-Saeedi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marist College. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT and a Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University.

Speaker: fabian romero 

Topic: fabian (P’urhépecha) is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and affiliated faculty in American Indian and Ethnic Studies at the Ohio State University. fabian’s work explores the manifestations of colonial heteropatriarchy in contemporary mestizo P’urhépecha heritage family structures in Michoacán and the diaspora. You can find their work in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer, Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, and their self-published chapbook Mountains of Another Kind. 

Bio: This talk starts with how my family settled in the Pacific Northwest, breaking multiple generations of cyclical migration as temporary migrant workers. I explore how the immigration process compounds the struggles of queer migrants, some conditions in Michoacán that force migration for campesinos and Indigenous people from the P'urhépecha region, and the legacy of the Bracero program. The second part of this talk explores how I built a relationship with the land that my family settled on as a queer P'urhépecha in the diaspora.”