LAB ALUMNI
Genevieve Bates
Zikai Li
Max Blaisdell
Bryant Cong
Sabreena Croteau
David Johnson
Evgenia Olimpieva
Karina Cheung
Viivi Järvi
Will Jaffe
Ken Krmoyan
Anna Rumer
Ojashwi Sapkota
Jordi Vasquez
Hani Warith
Ji Xue
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Genevieve Bates (PhD, University of Chicago) is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago and an incoming assistant professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. 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 worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from January 2017 to August 2021 and 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.
Zikai Li is a PhD student in political science. His substantive research interests include intergroup conflict and cooperation, the politics of trade, and non-strategic aspects of belief formation. Methodologically, he is interested in the application of causal inference and machine learning in political science. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in June 2020. You can contact Zikai at zkl@uchicago.edu.
Bryant Cong is a first-year MA student in Public Policy, Certificate in Research Methods at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His research interests center around the political economies of East Asia and Latin America, particularly the interaction between democracy and development in these regions. Prior to joining the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in August 2021, Bryant received undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Economics/Mathematics from the University of Southern California. You can contact Bryant at bryantco@uchicago.edu.
Sabreena Croteau is a predoctoral fellow at USC and a senior PhD student in political science, focusing on international relations and comparative politics. While she is more broadly interested in the political economy of international security, those interests have also drawn her towards looking at comparative regimes and transitions in the context of global politics and the international economy. Her regional interests include the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the context of African regimes and transitions, she hopes to bring the data and ideas regarding transitional justice and democratic stabilization developed in the project into conversation with Phillip Roessler's work on the coup-civil war paradox. As a member of the Lab, Sabreena worked on collecting events for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. You can contact Sabreena at croteausa@uchicago.edu.
Evgenia Olimpieva is a sixth-year PhD student in political science, specializing in comparative politics and political methodology. Her research focuses on autocracies with an emphasis on the post-Soviet region. Her dissertation project deals with law enforcement agencies in Russia, their role in authoritarian regime consolidation and backsliding. In collaboration with Professor Monika Nalepa, Ipek Cinar and Genevieve Bates, she is currently working on the project that seeks to answer whether some types of transitional justice negatively impact young democracies by inadvertently increasing the levels of organized crime. Evgenia is also interested in the topic of collective memory and has written on the role of memory of the Great Patriotic War in the legitimation of Putin’s regime. Evgenia worked as part of the lab from 2015-2018, compiling event chronologies and collecting data on the fates of political elites. She has published in Nationalities Papers and Slavic Review. She has also contributed to the Washington Post's Monkey Cage Blog (link). You can read more about Evgenia here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Evgenia at eolimpieva@uchicago.edu.
Karina Cheung recently graduated from 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 was part of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from October 2019 to June 2021 and worked on the Global Transitional Justice Dataset project with a particular geographic interest in Asia and Europe. You can contact Karina at karinacheung21@uchicago.edu.
Viivi Järvi is a PhD student in the politics department at Princeton University and a former student in the Committee on International Relations Master's program. She graduated from the University of Chicago in June 2018 with a BA in political science and romance languages and literatures. She worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from 2017-2020, collecting data in particular on Northern and Southern European countries. As a comparativist, her regions of interest include Southern Europe and Latin America, and her substantive interests encompass questions on political violence and post-conflict justice. You can contact Viivi at viivi.jarvi@gmail.com.
Will Jaffe was a student 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 worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from June 2020 to August 2021. You can contact will at jaffew@uchciago.edu.
Ken Krmoyan is a JD student at Duke University and a recent graduate of the College, who double majored in political science and economics. Ken has broad interests in international relations, international political economy, transitional justice, and human rights, and will begin law school in the Fall of 2021. 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.
Anna Rumer graduated from the University of Chicago in 2020 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 worked at the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab throughout 2020, and was responsible for collecting transitional justice data on the United States. You can contact Anna at annarumer@uchicago.edu.
Ojashwi Sapkota graduated in 2020 from the Master of Arts Program in Social Science. Her concentration was in political science. While working for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, she collected and coded data on criminal trials. Her regions of interest include South Asia, and her substantive interests encompass human rights, international organizations, and post-conflict transitional justice.
Jordi Vasquez is a recent graduate from the College. He majored in political science and minored in history. He worked as part of the lab from June of 2018 until December of 2020. He is broadly interested in international relations, authoritarian regime elite survival, and international security. As part of the project, he primarily worked on researching the fates of authoritarian elites for both interwar and post-World War II authoritarian regimes which transitioned to democracy, in addition to creating, merging, and analyzing datasets utilizing this data. He is currently working on a paper with Professor Nalepa on the relationship between de jure transitional justice policies and de facto authoritarian elite survival outcomes. You can contact Jordi at jordi.n.vasquez@gmail.com.
Hani Warith is a PhD student in the politics department at Princeton University and a former student in the Committee on International Relations Master's program. He is primarily interested in comparative politics focusing on regime transitions, transitional justice, and political behavior. Hani was a member of the lab in 2019 and 2020. As a member of the lab, he was most heavily involved in collecting data on transitional justice as it relates to the Middle East and South Asia. Hani's master's thesis focused on majoritarian protest in consociational democracies, combining quantitative analysis with case-study research of Iraq, Lebanon and Bosnia. You can contact Hani at hwarith@uchicago.edu.
Ji Xue is a seventh-year PhD candidate in political science. She specializes in formal theory and comparative politics. Ji's current research focuses on the concept of pivotality. She is working on two projects at the moment. The first project builds a new measure of policy stability based on preferences of political actors. The other project uses a lab experiment and survey to examine how people's sense of being pivotal affects public goods provision. Ji was involved with the lab in 2017 and 2018, when she coded transitional justice events for a variety of countries. You can contact Ji at jixue@uchicago.edu.
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