Emma Briant is a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow in receipt of full scholarship from the Economics and Social Research Council of Great Britain. While based at the Center she will be undertaking fieldwork for her Ph.D. thesis The Negotiation of Anglo-American Defense Relations, and the Information Strategy Development of the Global ‘War on Terror. Her research asks in what ways Britain and America negotiate information relationships in producing information to maintain amity and secure their long-term international goals. It will approach this question within an analysis of communication negotiated subject to power relationships and processes. It will cover all levels of decision making, planning, and practice from the strategic to the tactical and examine two case studies: the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. She will complete a six-month stay at the Center in September 2009.

Cynthia Burack
Ohio State University
Tough Love: Conservative Christianity’s Compassion Crusades

Jeff Colgan is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, focusing on oil politics and international security. His dissertation is entitled Oil, Revolution, and International Conflict: Explaining Aggressive Foreign Policy Among Petrostates. Jeff’s current work focuses on explaining the correlation between international conflict and petrostates. Some of the most important members of the international community, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Russia, and Venezuela, have significant oil production capacity and often use their oil income to fund military expenditures. Understanding how oil and conflict are interrelated is an essential part of understanding the modern global political economy.

John FitzGibbon is a visiting scholar from the University of Sussex. While in DC John will be focusing on his research, Eurosceptic Protest Movements in the Wider Social Movement Context.

Michael New is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. While in residence at the Centennial Center Michael will be working on his project, The Interaction Between Institutions and Citizen Ideology on Fiscal Outcomes. He will analyze how fiscal outcomes are affected by the interaction between fiscal institutions and citizen ideology and will use data from both the US Census Bureau and the National Association of State Budget Office.

Stacey Pelika is an assistant professor of government at the College of William & Mary. While at the Center she is completing research for a book manuscript that looks at the role of the opinions of prominent groups and individuals in policy debates. Specifically, her research looks at how political elites attempt to shape who the public views as being on each side of an issue, and how those strategies influence citizens' policy preferences.

Caitlin Talmadge is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is also a member of the Security Studies Program. As a Visiting Scholar, Caitlin will be conducting research for her dissertation, which examines variation in states’ battlefield effectiveness in interstate wars. The dissertation develops and tests an explanation of such variation based on the ways in which the presence or absence of different types of internal threats influence states’ abilities to generate war fighting power from their material resources.

Southern Methodist University's John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Science rents a Center office for use by members of its faculty while in the Washington, D.C. area. The space is primarily used by Seyom Brown, Johns Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security, and James F. Hollifield, Tower Center Director.