IPR Welcomes Four New Faculty Fellows
Representing the fields of history, education and social policy, political science, and economics, these faculty fellows will enhance the institute's interdisciplinarity

Spring 2007, Volume 29, Number 1

Nancy MacLean
Professor of History and African American Studies
PhD, U.S. History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989

Nancy MacLean specializes in the history of social movements and public policy. With expertise in African American, women’s, and labor history, she has often offered new analyses of long-standing historical debates.

Her most recent book, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, Harvard University Press, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006) reveals how central the quest for better jobs was to all modern equality movements: the black freedom movement, the women’s movement, and the Mexican American civil rights movement. It concludes that creating more good jobs for all Americans is vital to fulfill the vision of human rights for which these movements labored.

She is currently working on a book that will trace the closing of schools in Prince Edward County, Va., from 1959 to 1964. The closings grew out of the state’s policy of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education advocated by Southern segregationists. This five-year struggle also generated the first push for the tuition grants and school vouchers that later became a cause of national conservatives.

Andrew Roberts
Assistant Professor of Political Science
PhD, Political Science, Princeton University, 2003

Political scientist Andrew Roberts studies comparative politics, democratization, and public policy. He has been an assistant professor at Northwestern University since 2002.

One of his most recent projects examines the debate in several countries over partial or full privatization of pension systems, including Social Security in the United States. In exploring the politics behind the push for privatization, Roberts hopes to show how a loss of public trust in the public scheme and relative confidence in financial markets might induce citizens to support privatization.

In his work, he has also looked at new democracies in Eastern Europe, which he frequently compares to established democracies in Western Europe and North America. He recently completed a book manuscript looking at the quality of democracy in ten countries.

Michelle Reininger
Assistant Professor of Human Development, Social Policy, and Learning Sciences
PhD, Economics of Education, Stanford University, 2006

Michelle Reininger’s broad research agenda aims to provide a better understanding of the dynamics behind teacher labor markets including preparation, recruitment, and retention. Specifically, Reininger studies how geography affects teachers’ occupational decision making as well as the role community colleges play in supplying teachers to areas with hard-to-staff schools.

Currently, she is involved with the Teacher Pathways Project, a multiyear study that analyzes and identifies the attributes of teacher preparation programs and pathways into teaching in New York City that have a positive impact on student outcomes.

A former chemistry teacher, Reininger received a PhD in the economics of education and a master’s in economics from Stanford University and a master’s in education policy from the University of Virginia. She joined Northwestern University this fall.

Éva Nagypál
Assistant Professor of Economics
PhD, Economics, Stanford University, 2001

Economist Éva Nagypál’s research focuses on labor-market dynamics at the micro- and macro-levels, the determination of unemployment and of firms’ hiring behavior, and the impact of macroeconomic policies on labor-market outcomes.

She has studied the impact of learning on the formation and dissolution of employment relationships and how learning relates to employment protection policies.

Her current interest is understanding job-to-job transitions, which encompasses the moves of workers between employers without an intervening spell of unemployment, their role in the reallocation of labor towards its more productive uses, and their interaction with labor-market regulation.

Nagypál has been an assistant professor at Northwestern University for four years. She spent 2002 as a visiting researcher at Stockholm University in Sweden.

For more information about these and other IPR faculty fellows, go to: www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/faculty.html