Current Visiting Scholars

Samuel Barkin is a political scientist with a focus on international relations. Within this subfield his interests range widely, including questions about the epistemology of international relations, the history and norms of the sovereign states system, international organizations, and the global politics of the environment, oceans, and fisheries.

While at CASBS he will be preparing a manuscript on a critical history of the sovereign states system, in the context of the stories that international relations as a discipline tells itself about constancy and change in that system. Those stories often trace the system to the Peace of Westphalia, implying a system that is both deeply historically entrenched and a purely European creation. This project argues instead that the system developed much later through contestations of ideas between European states and former colonies, along with other emerging states. The aim of the project is to return agency in the creation of the international political system to the postcolonial world. 

Barkin is a professor of global governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published widely on international relations and organization; his books include The Sovereignty Cartel, Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory, and International Organization: Theories and Institutions, 3rd ed.

Gabrielle Clark is a scholar of law and American capitalism who focuses on labor migration. She is an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles. Earlier this year, the National Endowment of Humanities awarded her a fellowship to complete her book, Lineages of the Deportable Labor State: Migrant Workers and the Law in American History. This is the project she brings to CASBS.

Lineages is the first book to examine how the US built a deportable labor state to govern migrants as workers from agriculture to the knowledge economy. Under threat of repatriation and without access to the welfare state, “Braceros,” H, L, and J visa workers, as well as undocumented laborers, have all been subject to the deportable labor state. As employers around the world increasingly rely on vulnerable labor migrants, Lineages shows us how employers reproduce this second-class labor force: by dominating an extensive legal machinery, from the border to the workplace. 

Clark’s publications on migrant labor law and other themes in law and American capitalism can be found in journals such as Law & Policy, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Law & Social Inquiry, The American Journal of Legal History, New Labor Forum, and Antipode. 

Jennifer Hollowell is currently collaborating with CASBS fellow Ralph Schroeder on a study about how Sweden’s exceptional approach to Covid-19 was regarded in other parts of the world, especially the US. The study explores how the Swedish approach was represented and discussed in traditional and alternative (right-wing) media outlets in the US. During her time as a visiting scholar at CASBS she will continue with this study together with research on behaviour change in a global health context.

Hollowell is an epidemiologist and medical anthropologist. She was previously an associate professor in the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU) at the University of Oxford where her research focussed on maternal health and childbirth and on social and ethnic disparities in pregnancy outcomes and infant mortality. 

More recently she has moved into the field of global health and currently works for an international NGO that creates and delivers mass media health-related behaviour change interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. She has been involved in the design and evaluation of radio, TV and social media campaigns targeting child survival, family planning, parenting practices that support early child development, and (currently) mental health. During the pandemic she worked on a series of rapid-response radio and TV campaigns relating to Covid-19.

Dawn Michele Moore is a cognitive psychologist who studies the development of executive function and cognitive control in children and adolescents. She is particularly interested in how prenatal teratogen exposure is associated with executive function and academic outcomes. Over the past few years, she has been analyzing data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, exploring the effects of prenatal alcohol and/or tobacco exposure on the development of executive function and adolescent academic performance. 

During her time as a visiting scholar at CASBS, she will be writing and publishing her research findings related to this area of study. Furthermore, she will be involved in two collaborative research projects also using data from the ABCD Study. One of these collaborations will employ machine learning techniques to explore the cognitive development variables found in the ABCD Study. The second collaborative project will involve exploring the relationship between verbal ability and academic outcomes as well as any associations with prenatal teratogen exposure. Moore holds a PhD and MA in cognitive psychology from Claremont Graduate University.

Stephanie Selover is an archaeologist of ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Her research interests include the prehistoric and Iron Age cultures of the Middle East, evidence of violence on ancient human remains, the origins of violence and warfare in the ancient world, and the effects of modern politics on archaeology of the Middle East. She has excavated archaeological sites in Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Italy, and the United States. Selover is currently co-director for Project Logistic and Prehistoric Studies at Çadır Höyuk in Türkiye, and a field director at the site of Khirbat al-Balu'a in Jordan. 

While at the Center she will be working on her second book, focused on Southern Levantine Iron Age I and II (ca. 900-700 BCE) domestic household archaeology, with a focus on the recent excavations at the Moabite site of Khirbat al-Baluʿa. Through this study, she hopes to better understand everyday domestic life of the Moabite peoples.

Selover is currently an associate professor in middle eastern languages and cultures and adjunct professor in anthropology at the University of Washington, and adjunct curator at the Burke Museum. Her first book focused on the presence and purpose of violence in early Anatolian societies.