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2007 Program Highlights 2007 Program Highlights APSA Annual Meeting - Chicago, Illinois

Join us for the APSA Annual Meeting
Each Day
 

To find out what's happening each day, check back here often, but please also consult the online program, which will be updated continuously until the Annual Meeting.

Wednesday, August 29
  9:00 am - 5:00 pm: Professional Day
The pre-convention professional day features a variety of pre-convention seminars and short courses sponsored by Organized Sections and Related Groups.
Thursday, August 30
 

10:15 am - 12:00 pm: Theme Panel: Funding Interdisciplinary Research
Robert Axelrod (University of Michigan), Kennette Benedict (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), Edward Hackett (National Science Foundation), Felice J. Levine (American Educational Research Association), Nicole A. Stahlmann (Social Science Research Council), Howard J. Silver (Consortium of Social Science Associations)

12:45 pm: APSA Awards Ceremony
Hosted by the 2007 Program Committee Co-Chairs Elisabeth Gerber and David Lake, the Awards Ceremony recognizes excellence in the profession and begins with an invitation-only luncheon for awardees and their guests at 12:00 pm.

The Awards Ceremony begins at 12:45 pm and is open to all attendees.

4:15 pm - 6:00 pm: Theme Panel: Religion, Economics and Culture: Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Research; Co-sponsored by Division 33
Carolyn M. Warner (Arizona State University), Eli Berman (University of California, San Diego), David D. Laitin (Stanford University), Roger Finke (Pennsylvania State University), Anthony Gill (University of Washington), Colleen E.H. Berndt (San Jose State University), William Roberts Clark (University of Michigan)

Pi Sigma Alpha Guest Lecture
Michael Beschloss

Michael Beschloss6:00 pm
In Presidential Courage : Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 (Simon & Schuster; May 2007), best selling author Michael Beschloss chronicles the crucial moments during the terms of nine Presidents who eventually overcome critics and the pressure of events to dramatically change the future of the United States. Blending research and storytelling, he takes readers through 200 years of American history as he discusses such presidents as George Washington, John Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. In his book, Beschloss reveals the inner turmoil presidents experienced as they made decisions in both the national interest and their own career interests. He also delves into how each of the men drew strength from wives and family, friends, private conviction and, sometimes, religious faith.

Beschloss has authored numerous best sellers, including The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945; Reaching for Glory, as well as Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair; and Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance. As NBC News Presidential Historian, he appears on all NBC News programs, including Today, NBC Nightly News, and Meet the Press. He is also a regular on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Beschloss has held appointments in history at the Harvard Russian Research Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and St. Anthony's College, Oxford.

6:30 pm: Graduate Student Happy Hour
Graduate students are invited to network with each other and meet informally with APSA President Robert Axelrod and other APSA Officers and Council.

2007 Presidential Address
Robert Axelrod, University of Michigan

8:00 pm
APSA President Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan will deliver his Presidential Address during the Annual Meeting.

Following the Presidential Address, APSA will host the 103rd APSA Annual Meeting Opening Reception. 

9:00 pm: Opening Reception
Following the Presidential Address, APSA will host the 103rd APSA Annual Meeting Opening Reception.  All attendees are invited to enjoy an evening of entertainment with hor d'oeuvres and cocktails.
Sponsored by Cambridge University Press.

Friday, August 31
 

10:15 am: Theme Panel: 40 Years of Challenge: Critical Issues Then and Now
Christine A. Kelly (William Paterson University), Francis Fox Piven (CUNY, Graduate Center), Margaret Levi ( University of Washington, Seattle), Judith Grant (Ohio University), Dean E. Robinson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), J. Phillip Thompson (Long Island University), Cornel West (Princeton University)

Plenary Session: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Duncan Watts, Columbia University
10:30 am-12:00pm
Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, directs the Collective Dynamics Group. His research interests include the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and dynamics of social influence, and the nature of distributed "social" search. Prof. Watts will address the foundations of social network theory and update research from his best-selling book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, 1999).

12:00 pm: Meet the Officer and Council Nominees
An opportunity to meet the 2007 Council and Officer nominees.

12:00-2:00 pm: Getting Published in Political Science, Session 1

12:00-2:00 pm: Workshop for Department Chairs: Development at a Departmental Level
The 2007 Workshop for Political Science Department Chairs will be dedicated to discussing the role department chairs play in financial development. The APSA Departmental Services Committee invites you to share major successes or challenges that you have come across while fundraising. Contact dsp@apsanet.org for additional information.

4:15 pm-6:00 pm Comparative Guest Lecture: Remembering Donald Rothchild; Sponsored by Division 11
Professor Donald Rothchild's prolific scholarship and generous academic leadership were defining influences for half a century on the field of international relations, particularly on developing nations of sub-Saharan Africa. This panel will be an opportunity for those with whom he worked over the decades to recall his tireless efforts as scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend. The panel will be led by those scholars with whom he most actively collaborated, but will encourage participation by all whose lives he touched.

Donald Rothchild authored and edited over twenty books and dozens of articles and book chapters on an array of subjects including ethnic conflict, conflict management, U.S. foreign policy, and Africa's relations with the global political order. He taught for over forty years at the University of California-Davis, taking time for visiting appointments at several African universities. He was a chair or member of several editorial boards and the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trust.

Beyond his own scholarship and professional leadership, Donald Rothchild magnified his contributions to the field of international relations through his tireless collaboration and counsel with many scholars, resulting in works that have made important contributions to the field.

John Gaus Lecture
Lawrence E. Lynn, Jr., Texas A&M University

6:00 pm
Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., is the George H. W. Bush Chair and Professor of Public Affairs at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He is also the Sydney Stein, Jr., Professor of Public Management Emeritus in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) at the University of Chicago. He has also held positions at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the Brookings Institution, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Lynn has held senior positions with the U.S. federal government, including deputy assistant secretary of defense; director of program analysis at the National Security Council; assistant secretary, Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and assistant secretary, Department of the Interior.

Professor Lynn’s current projects are concerned with models and methods for the empirical study of governance and public management, public choice and institutional theories as applied to the management of public bureaucracies, the executive function in government, and the government's role in human service provision. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. He is past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Society of Public Administration.

 

Lasswell Symposium
Extremism: Causes and Cures
Cass R. Sunstein, University of Chicago
6:00 - 7:00 pm: Cass R. Sunstein, a graduate of Harvard College (1975) and Harvard Law School (1978), has held posts under U.S. Justice Thurgood Marshall, in addition to posts at the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the U.S. Department of Justice. Currently professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, Prof. Sunstein vice-chairs the ABA Committee on Separation of Powers and Governmental Organizations, chairs the Administrative Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and is a member of the ABA Committee on the future of the FTC and the President's Advisory Committee on the Public Service Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. Prof. Sunstein will speak on extremism as an example of social cascades and polarization and how they influence political behavior.

7:00 pm Reception Honoring Teaching
Everyone is invited to a reception honoring campus-wide teaching award recipients and the winner of the 2007 Rowman & Littlefield Award for innovative teaching.

8:00 pm Political Engagement: A Moderated Discussion with The New York Times and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Sponsored by The New York Times; Co-sponsored by the APSA Committee on Civic Education and Engagement
Elizabeth Beaumont (University of Minnesota), Thomas Ehrlich (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), John Presley (Illinois State University), The New York Times - TBA

Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University

Lawrence Lessig8:30 pm
Already at the top of the field of constitutional law before he began his intensive focus on the law of cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig has concentrated his scholarship on the problem of how law should govern the exchange of information and ideas in a digital age. He is a leading figure in the United States and internationally in cyberlaw, a field that lies at the previously unexplored intersection of constitutional law and intellectual property law.

Professor Lessig is the founding director of the law school’s Center for Internet and Society, chair of the Creative Commons project, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2000, he was a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. After completing his legal studies, Professor Lessig clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

10:00 pm Nightcap Receptions

Saturday, September 1
 

10:15am-12:00 pm Theme Panel: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Inequality
Nolan M. McCarty (Princeton University), Elisabeth S. Jacobs (Harvard University), Jacob S. Hacker (Yale University), Timothy M. Smeeding (Syracuse University), John D. Huber (Columbia Universeity), Piero Stanig (Columbia University)

12:00-2:00 pm Getting Published in Political Science, Session 2

Plenary Session: Chimpanzee Politics: 25th Anniversary of a Machiavellian Exposé
Frans de Waal, Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Frans B.M. de Waal, a native of the Netherlands, trained as a zoologist and ethologist at three Dutch universities (Nijmegen, Groningen, Utrecht), and earned a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Utrecht in 1977.  Prof. de Waal holds joint appointments at the Psychology Department of Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, both in Atlanta. His widely read book Chimpanzee Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) highlights six years of research on the world’s largest captive colony of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo, beginning in 1978. Prof. de Waal will focus on new research on politics among primates in the 25 years since the publication of his path-breaking study.

2:00 pm Theme Panel: Insights for International Security from the Life Sciences
Bradley A. Thayer (Missouri State University), Dominic Johnson ( Princeton University), Malcolm Potts (University of California, Berkeley), Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut), Valerie M. Hudson (Brigham Young University)

4:15 pm - 6:00 pm Theme Panel: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Issue of Vote Rigging
Gary W. Cox (University of California, San Diego), Tracy Campbell (University of Kentucky), Walter R. Mebane, Jr. (Cornell University), Emily Ann Beaulieu (University of Kentucky), Andrew W. Appel (Princeton University), Susan Dayton Hyde (Yale University), J. Morgan Kousser (California Institute of Technology)

Plenary Session: Finding Democracy in the American Ghetto
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia University
6:00 pm -7:30 pm
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. His works include: Living Underground: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (forthcoming, Harvard University Press, 2006) a study of illegal and informal economic behavior in a working poor community in Chicago, and American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Harvard 2000), an exploration of the social organization, moral universe, and history of the Chicago housing development, the Robert Taylor Homes. His 2005 documentary Dislocation follows families as they relocate from condemned public housing. His current research in urban American poverty includes a longitudinal study of vice and drug economies in Chicago and New York (with economist Steven Levitt), a comparative project on French and U.S. public housing, and an ethnographic study of the revitalization of Chicago in the 1990s.


6:15 pm APSA Annual Business Meeting
This is a great chance for you to participate in APSA governance and witness the leadership transition from President Robert Axelrod to President-Elect Diane Pinderhughes.  For more about the agenda and rules of the meeting click here.

Plenary Session: New Political Science
Christian Parenti, London School of Economics
Christian Parenti8:30 pm
Christian Parenti is a correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (the New Press 2004); The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror; (Basic Books, 2003) and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, (Verso, 2000).  He is a former Soros Senior Justice Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.  He will be speaking on the war in Afghanistan.

Questions? Contact the Annual Meeting staff at meeting@apsanet.org.