Affiliated Scholars

Kelebogile Zvobgo

Kelebogile Zvobgo is an Assistant Professor of Government at William & Mary and the founder and director of the International Justice Lab. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from USC in 2021. At USC, she was Provost's Fellow in the Social Sciences, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 USC Ph.D. Achievement Award. She served as the SPEC Lab's first director.

Lynn Ta

Lynn Ta is a social justice attorney whose work focuses on human rights and constitutional law. Her current research examines the effectiveness of the World Bank’s accountability mechanism in redressing human rights violations. Dr. Ta was a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Harry Pregerson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has worked to enforce workers’ rights as a civil prosecutor with the National Labor Relations Board and the California Department of Industrial Relations. She has also served as court-appointed counsel to indigent defendants in their criminal appeals, and was an attorney fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties. While at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Dr. Ta was part of the litigation team that drafted a successful appeal on behalf of genocide survivors at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a United Nations hybrid tribunal prosecuting the war crimes of Khmer Rouge officials. Dr. Ta has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, San Diego.

Cesi Cruz

Cesi Cruz is an assistant professor at the Institute of Asian Research and the Department of Political Science at UBC. She studies political economy, focusing on the interplay between electoral incentives and development outcomes in consolidating democracies. Her research uses quantitative and qualitative methods, social network analysis, surveys, and field experiments.

Christopher Fariss

Christopher Fariss is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Prior to beginning this appointment, he was the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University. With the other members of the Security and Political Economy Lab, Professor Fariss is helping to develop new measurement models of important political and economic concepts that are difficult to directly observe. All of his projects cover a broad array of themes but they each share a focus on computationally intensive methods, research design, and measurement.

Allison Kingsley

Allison Kingsley is an assistant professor of Strategy at the University of Vermont's Grossman School of Business. Professor Kingsley's research examines political risk and how it affects firms' investment location decisions, strategies, and performance. She aims to advance understanding in the fields of political economy, strategy, and international business.

Erik Gartzke

Erik Gartzke is a professor at the Department of Political Science and Director of cPASS at University of California, San Diego. His primary area of study involves the impact of information and institutions on war and peace. He applies bargaining theory, rational choice institutional theory, concepts of power and social identity, and statistical analysis to four substantive areas of interest: The Liberal Peace, International Institutions, Diplomacy, and The System.

Duy Trinh

Duy Trinh is a Data and Statistical Specialist at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG) within the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His primary research interests lie within explaining the causes and effects of violent intra-elite conflicts in authoritarian regimes, especially China and Vietnam, as they relate to political purges, censorship, and factional politics. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2021 and has been a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) fellow since 2020. As the Data Science Advisor in the SPEC Lab, Dr. Trinh provides high-end statistical advising to our students and on lab projects, including the directed-dyad-year version of the IPE data resource, our pending R package release, and our research on economic interdependence and conflict.

Neil Narang

Neil Narang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research focuses on international security, conflict management and peacebuilding, and the relationship between international institutions and conflict. He is working with the SPEC Lab on a research project related to economic interdependence and conflict, with an emphasis on strategic competition between the U.S., China, and Russia.

Jack Zhang

Jack Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas (KU). Professor Zhang’s research explores the political economy of trade and conflict in East Asia and he is working with the SPEC Lab on a research project related to economic interdependence and conflict, with an emphasis on strategic competition between the U.S. and China. Dr. Zhang is bilingual in English and Chinese, and he has worked as a political risk consultant (specializing in China) for both private sector and government clients.

Nan Jia

Nan Jia is an Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business. Her current research interests include corporate political strategy, business-governance relationships, and corporate governance in international business. She has collaborated with the SPEC Lab on several projects related to foreign investment and political risk.

Nicolás Albertoni

Nicolás Albertoni is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Uruguay (UCU) and the founder and director of the UCU Business Research Lab. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from USC in 2021. He was a recipient of The Order of Arête, the highest honor accorded graduate students upon completion of their academic programs at USC.

Therese Anders

Therese Anders is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include peace and conflict studies and political methodology. Her dissertation focuses on the conceptualization and development of new estimates of territorial control and subnational conflict exposure in civil wars using machine learning and geo-coded event data. From 2016 to 2017, she served as SPEC's Director of Research and Training, developed the data science curriculum, and taught classes on data wrangling and visualization. Therese will be working with RStudio on a project prototyping tools for Calibrated Peer Review in data science classes in the summer 2019. Her work appears in Political Psychology and a chapter in a Cambridge University Press volume, with several papers on the structure of the international system and latent variable measurement currently under review.

UCU Business Research Lab

Directed by SPEC Alum, Dr. Nicolás Albertoni, the Business Research Lab at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay is a UCU project in association with the Security and Political Economy Lab of the University of Southern California and the Competitiveness Program of the McDonough School of Global Business of Georgetown University.

International Justice Lab

Founded and directed by SPEC Alum Dr. Kelebogile Zvobgo, IJL brings together faculty and students from across the United States to conduct research on human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts. IJL research has been published in leading, peer-reviewed social science journals such as the International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, and International Journal of Transitional Justice.

Gunboat Capitalism

THE Security and Political economy LAB

Affiliated Scholars

SPEC ALUMNI LABS