Fall Colloquium: Envisioning Democratic Futures

Daniel Ziblatt

Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University where he also serves as the director of Harvard’s University Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Prof. Ziblatt leads a research group based in Germany at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.  His research focuses on Europe and the comparative study of democracy. He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” The book has been translated into thirty languages. In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority (also with Steven Levitsky), an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective–and also a New York Times bestseller. Prior to this, Prof. Ziblatt was the author of the prize-winning book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a history of democracy in Europe, in addition to a book on European state-building entitled Structuring the State (Princeton University Press, 2006).  In 2023, he was elected a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore is a Professor of Political Science at Yale University with a specialization in political theory. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. Her recent work, Open Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020), develops a new paradigm of democracy in which the exercise of power is as little gated as possible and explores a new version of popular rule where power is equally open to all. In 2021, with Jason Brennan, she also published Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less?, a comprehensive assessment of democracy’s present and possible futures around the world. Prof. Landemore is a fellow at the Ethics in AI Institute at the University of Oxford, and an advisor to the Democratic Inputs to AI program at OpenAI. She served on the Governance Committee of the most recent French Citizens’ Convention and is currently undertaking work supported by Schmidt Futures through the AI2050 program.

Susan B. Glasser

Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.

Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications, including Politico, where she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure as editor in chief. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She edited Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, early in her career.

Her books include “Kremlin Rising,” “The Man Who Ran Washington,” and, most recently, “The Divider,” a best-selling history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Theda Skocpol

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on U.S. social policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. Prof. Skocpol has recently launched new projects on the development of U.S. higher education and on the transformations of U.S. federal policies in the Obama era. Her work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) and American politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Her books and articles have been widely cited in political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science. At Harvard, she has served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005-2007) and Director of the Center for American Political Studies (2000-2006). In 2007, Skocpol was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her “visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence.”

Angela Ards

Teaches African American and contemporary American literature, with special interests in cultural studies, literary journalism, and narratives of place. She is the author of Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era, and her current book project uses oral histories to chronicle the lives of black Americans who bypassed the Great Migration to remain in the South. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Gerald Easter

Gerald Easter teaches courses in Comparative Politics, with a regional focus on Russia and Eastern Europe. His research interests include the modern state, post-communist transitions, comparative political economy. Current research projects focus on comparative politics of policing and pre-modern politics.   

He is the author of the following books: Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Shaping the Economic Space of Russia (ed., Ashgate, 2000), Capital, Coercion, and Post-Communist States (Cornell University Press, 2012), The Tsarina's Lost Treasure (Pegasus, 2020), and Last Stand of the Raven Clan: When Russia Went to War in America (Pegasus, forthcoming).

He joined the Political Science faculty at Boston College in 2000. He also taught at Georgetown University, Miami University (Ohio), European University in Saint Petersburg, Venice International University, and University of Rome at Tor Vergata. He is currently the Department Chair. 

Kay Lehman Schlozman

Kay Lehman Schlozman serves as J. Joseph Moakley Endowed Professor of Political Science. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. The winner of the American Political Science Association’s 2004 Rowman and Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics.

She is co-author of Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age (with Henry Brady and Sidney Verba); The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (with Sidney Verba and Henry Brady), which won two PROSE Awards (for Government and Politics and Excellence in Social Sciences) awarded to scholarly books by the American Association of Publishers; The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation (with Nancy Burns and Sidney Verba), which was co-winner of the APSA’s Schuck Prize; Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (with Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady), which was the winner of the APSA's Philip Converse Prize and the Book Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research; Organized Interests and American Democracy (with John T. Tierney); and Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response (with Sidney Verba). She has written numerous articles in professional journals and is editor of Elections in America and co-editor of The Future of Political Science (with Gary King and Norman H. Nie).

Among her professional activities, she has served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association and as chair of the APSA’s organized section on Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior. She is the winner of the APSA’s 2006 Frank Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession of Political Science; the 2016 Samuel Eldersveld Career Achievement Award; and the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Warren E. Miller Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of elections, public opinion, and voting behavior. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.