who we are

Monika Nalepa, Director

Genevieve Bates, Program Manager

Ipek Cinar, Data Manager and Assistant Program Manager

Karina Cheung, Research Assistant

Will Jaffe, Research Assistant

David Johnson, Research Assistant

Benjamin Konstan, Research Assistant

Ken Krmoyan, Senior Research Assistant

Zikai Li, Research Assistant

Anna Rumer, Research Assistant

Moksha Sharma, Senior Research Assistant

Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Studies in Logic and Rhetoric, and Decyzje. Read more about Monika here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Professor Nalepa at mnalepa@uchicago.edu.

Genevieve Bates is a sixth-year PhD candidate in political science. Her research interests include political violence, human rights, transitional justice, and international criminal law. Her dissertation project focuses on the strategies domestic political actors use to address the prospect of International Criminal Court investigations during peace negotiations, and the implications of those negotiations for domestic justice processes. She joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in January 2017 and has contributed to the collection and coding of transitional justice data, as well as overall project organization and operations. She has several ongoing projects as part of the lab, including work identifying the causal effects of truth commissions on the quality of democracy, and work exploring the relationship between post-authoritarian purges and crime in young democracies. She has published in Perspectives on Politics​. Read more about Genevieve here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Genevieve at genbates@uchicago.edu.

Ipek Cinar is a third-year PhD student in political science. She studies comparative politics with a focus on comparative democratization, quantitative & computational methods, and their applications to political science research. She received a BA in economics and business from Koc University, Turkey (2016) and an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago (2018). She joined the lab in January 2017 and has been contributing to the coding as well as collection of transitional justice events for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. She has also been extensively involved in the creation of the web interface for the purpose of making a user friendly geo-coded mappings of the projects. She has published in Perspectives on Politics. She also has several ongoing projects as part of the lab, including work identifying the causal effects of transitional justice events on the quality of democracy, and work identifying the causal effects of purges on crime. Read more about Ipek here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Ipek at ipekcinar@uchicago.edu.

Karina Cheung is a fourth-year undergraduate in the College, majoring in public policy and minoring in history. She is interested in environmental and health policy, transitional justice, political theory, and is thinking about a career in policy or law. Karina joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in October 2019, working on the Global Transitional Justice Dataset project with a particular geographic interest in Asia and Europe. You can contact Karina at karinacheung21@uchicago.edu. 

Will Jaffe is a third-year undergraduate at the College majoring in political science. Within the discipline, he is particularly interested in democratic stability, human rights law, and studying the political parties associated with terrorist groups. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in June 2020 and is currently collecting data on criminal trial events. You can contact will at jaffew@uchciago.edu.  

David Alan Johnson is a first year MPP student and Pearson Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is a native of Brownsville, TN and has lived in Northern Ireland, Germany, Rwanda, and South Africa exploring transitional justice as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. As a fellow, he worked with survivors, ex-prisoners, museum directors, state officials, activists, and professors around truth and reconciliation, whether it be from conflict, slavery, genocide, apartheid, or dictator regimes. He conducted 40+ interviews and visited 60+ sites (memorials, museums, monuments) around each country’s past. Check out his Watson Fellowship blog here. He plans to pursue a career at the intersection of law and public policy addressing transitional justice in African-American communities. You can contact David at dajohn@uchicago.edu.

Ben Konstan is a third-year undergraduate in the College, majoring in mathematics and economics. His academic interests span game theory, modeling, and statistics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in one of these fields. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab​ in June 2019 to work on formally modeling social welfare during periods of transitional justice. He will focus on deriving the theory behind social outcomes for these events. You can contact Ben at konstan@uchicago.edu.

Ken Krmoyan is a fourth-year undergraduate in the College, double majoring in political science and economics. Ken has broad interests in international relations, international political economy, transitional justice, and human rights, and he is currently thinking about pursuing a career in law. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in September 2018 and has been contributing to the collection of events (e.g. purges, prosecutions, lustrations, trials) for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset project. Ken's geographic interests include post-Soviet countries and Eastern Europe generally, but he has also worked on Southern and Western Europe, as well as a few countries in Asia/Pacific. You can contact Ken at kkrmoyan@uchicago.edu.

Zikai Li is a second-year student in the Committee on International Relations Master's program. His substantive research interests include the origins of trade and immigration preferences and the consequences of globalization for domestic conflict. Methodologically, he is interested in the application of formal modeling, experiments, and machine learning in political science. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in June 2020 and is collecting data on transitional justice events in the United States. You can contact Zikai at zkl@uchicago.edu.

Anna Rumer recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Political Science and a minor in Environmental and Urban Studies. She is particularly interested in the politics of climate change, and she wrote her BA thesis on how the Citizens United Supreme Court decision has blocked federal climate change legislation in the United States. She joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in June 2020, and she is currently collecting transitional justice data on the United States. You can contact Anna at annarumer@uchicago.edu.

Moksha Sharma is a fourth-year undergraduate in the College, majoring in political science and English. She is particularly interested in political philosophy, law, and rhetoric. She has been working for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab since June 2019 and started with the chronology of transitional justice in South Korea. You can contact Moksha at moksha@uchicago.edu.