Faculty News

Professor Axelrod, second from left and Dr. Scott, center.

Professor Regina Axelrod was a panelist on the episode “Threats of War and Challenges of Peace,” part of Adelphi president Robert Scott’s T.V. program, “Exploring Critical Issues.”

Associate Professor Margaret Gray has won two awards for her book Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic about New York farmworkers and food politics (2014 University of California Press): the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Best Book Award from the Labor Project of the American Political Science Association. She has been interviewed about her book for local and national radio programs across the country, including the Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC). In the early summer, Professor Gray presented papers at the Labor and Employment Relations Annual Meeting and the Annual Meeting of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. This semester she will be giving talks at Brooklyn College, the College of Staten Island, and John Fisher College. Professor Gray is on sabbatical for the 2014-2015 academic year conducting research on labor trafficking in New York State.

Recently, Associate  Professor Katie Laatikainen completed two section introductions and a chapter for the two-volume, ten-part Sage Handbook on European Foreign Policy, for which she is a co-editor.  The handbook will appear in early 2015.  She also completed a book chapter, “The EU Delegation in New York: A Debut of High Drama” for the edited volume by David Spence and Josef Batora, European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia, which will be published by Palgrave in early 2015. In early September, she attended the University Association of Contemporary European Studies conference in Cork, Ireland where she presented a paper, ‘The Alliance of Small Island States at the UN:  The Challenge of Single Issue Groups in Multilateral Politics’ for the panel The Politics of Multilateralism in the UN: Emerging Groups in UNPolitics.  She was invited to be the external expert examiner on the Ph.D. jury for BregtSaenen, and so on November 3, 2014 she will be hosted by the University of Ghent to serve on the jury for his Ph.D. defense. Prof. Laatikainen was also panelist on President Robert A. Scott’s T.V. program on “Exploring Critical Issues; The 100^th anniversary of the Start of World War I.” on Telecare T.V. on May 15, 2014.

Associate Professor Traci Levy was on sabbatical during the spring 2014 semester. She conducted extensive research on military family policy and the ways presidents since Eisenhower have discussed military families in their State of the Union addresses. Prof. Levy wrote and presented a paper, “Armed and Caring? U.S. Military in Political Rhetoric and Family Policy” at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington. She also revised and extended an early paper about care relationships between disabled parents and their children. This work culminated in Professor Levy submitting for review one single-authored article manuscript and one co-authored article manuscript.

Professor Hugh A. Wilson, Professor Emeritus, was a panelist on Adelphi President Robert A. Scott’s T.V. program on “Exploring Critical Issues: The 100^th Anniversary of the Start of World War I.”

Jinu Abraham is a doctoral candidate at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. He is currently working on his dissertation researching the economic consequences of civil wars in the developing world by studying the institutional environment before and after conflict.  He is most concerned with how conflict shapes the political institutions most critical to economic growth.

Lisa Rickmers is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center who is completing her dissertation on Development and Social Justice after Peacebuilding under the supervision of Professor Thomas G. Weiss. In 2014, she continued to research the dynamics of local resistance to international peacebuilding in Timor Leste and Kosovo, considering the conditions under which locals exercised control of policy outcomes. Her work explores the various manifestations of resistance, the different actors involved, and the consequences of these forms of resistance on the peacebuilding process, with the intent to reveal which local actors were empowered by the international presence and the resulting consequences for democracy and social justice. She is currently engaging in interviews with government officials and leading members of civil society who were active during the transition period in each case.