New Faculty Fellows

Fall, 2009, Volume 31, Number 1

Morton Schapiro
Professor of Economics and Northwestern University President
PhD, Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 1979

Alongside his role as Northwestern University’s 16th president, Morton Schapiro joined IPR as a faculty fellow this fall. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the economics of higher education, with a particular focus on college financing and affordability. He also holds appointments in the Kellogg School of Management and the School of Education and Social Policy.

An economist, Schapiro has published more than 100 articles in academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Science, and Demography. He has written five books and edited two others, including the recently published College Success: What It Means and How to Make it Happen (College Board, 2008). This volume, co-edited with his longtime co-author and Spencer Foundation President Michael McPherson, examines the issue of how to define and measure college success from various perspectives, including those of students, faculty, and the college itself.

Schapiro spent the past nine years as president of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. From 1991 to 2000, he was a professor at the University of Southern California, where he served as dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and as vice president for planning for his last two years.

Micaela di Leonardo
Professor of Anthropology
PhD,  Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1981

Cultural anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo studies race- and gender-inflected social and economic inequality, with a focus on street-level American urban life. Much of di Leonardo’s work aims to connect “the global and the local” in innovative ways. New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America (SAR Press, 2008), co-edited with Jane Collins and Brett Williams, adds to the now-standard critique of neoliberal functioning at home and abroad and the contention that American neoliberal practices are fundamentally raced and gendered. The volume includes di Leonardo’s theoretical introduction and her case study on the neoliberalization of American consciousness.

di Leonardo’s awards and honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholarship in 2005–06 at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M. She also holds an appointment in performance studies.

Rebecca Seligman
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
PhD,  Anthropology, Emory University, 2004

Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective. Her research interests involve critical examination of the social and political-economic forces that affect the experience and distribution of mental and physical illness, with an emphasis on how such forces become physically embodied.

In particular, Seligman is interested in the relationships between psychosocial stress and traumatic experience and related outcomes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, somatization, and dissociation. Her current research seeks to address these issues among Latino immigrants to the United States.

Before joining Northwestern’s faculty, Seligman completed a postdoctoral fellowship, funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, in McGill University’s psychiatry department.

Laurel Harbridge
Assistant Professor of Political Science
PhD, Political Science, Stanford University, 2009

Laurel Harbridge’s research focuses on legislative behavior, organization, and the interplay between elections, Congress, and public policy. Her dissertation examined whether bipartisanship can persist in the U.S. Congress under periods of high party polarization. By focusing on the electoral incentives of members of Congress, she explores the persistence of bipartisanship despite increased party polarization.

Her other research interests include comparative politics and methodology in political science research. Harbridge will spend the year conducting research as a College Fellow and begin teaching as an assistant professor in fall 2010.

For more information about these and other IPR faculty, please visit
www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/faculty.html.