Margaret Levi, President 2004-05 University of Washington

Bio as of September 2005

Margaret Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She was formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and director of the Center for Labor Studies. Levi earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington.

Levi has authored three books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988) and Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and has co-edited five others. She is the joint author of Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998). In progress is a coauthored volume with Karen Cook and Russell Hardin, building on a multi-year Russell Sage Foundation project on trust and trustworthiness. Concurrently, she is working on a range of issues having to do with labor unions and with global justice campaigns. Some of the work builds on the WTO History Project , which she co-directed, and some derives from joint research with David Olson on union democracy. She also continues to write on issues concerning the analytic narrative approach to the study of complex historical and comparative processes.

Previous APSA responsibilities include serving as vice-president, president of the Organized Section on Political Economy, as Annual Meeting Program co-chair with James Alt, on the Executive Council, and on the Civic Education Task Force. In 1999, she became the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. She also is on the editorial boards of Politics & Society, the Annual Review of Political Science, Rationality and Society, and Political Studies. She has served on the board of the ICPSR and currently is on the boards of the Society for Comparative Research and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Levi maintains numerous community commitments. She serves on the Jobs for Justice workers' rights board. She was a member of the first coordinating committee of SAWSJ (Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice). With her husband, Robert D. Kaplan, she has developed a substantial collection of Australian aboriginal art, part of which is on loan to the Seattle Art Museum.

Her awards include the S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award in 2001. She was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in 1993-1994 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, 2002--2003. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. She has lectured and been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, the European University Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the Juan March Institute, the Budapest Collegium, Cardiff University, and Oxford University.

Levi has two strong professional commitments. The first is to the building of communities of scholars who take on significant social science questions by bridging sub-disciplines, disciplines, and theoretical approaches. The second is to improving our capacity to address important political and policy issues in the classroom and with the public.

• Article on Margaret Levi in the October 2004 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics