Steering Committee
Here is a presentation of the SIPGI Steering Committee.
Wendy Pearlman
Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she holds the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. A specialist in the comparative politics of the Middle East, she has published dozens of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books investigating questions related to conflict, social movements, and migration and refugee studies. Since 2012, Pearlman has conducted interviews with more than 500 displaced Syrians on five continents, from which she wrote We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017), a praised book that chronicles the Syrian uprising, war, and refugee crisis through Syrians’ own stories and reflections. Pearlman has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Fulbright, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, an MA from Georgetown, and a BA from Brown.
Daniel Masterson
Daniel Masterson is an Assistant Professor in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daniel’s research focuses on migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy, with a regional focus in the Middle East. Some of the questions he addresses in his work include: How do refugees make decisions about when and where to migrate? What are the causes of conflict and peaceful coexistence between refugees and host communities? How do refugees successfully cooperate to support themselves? What interventions effectively promote the well-being of refugees? Daniel’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. From 2018 to 2020 Daniel was a postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University, his MA in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Bates College.
David McKenzie
David McKenzie is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, Finance and Private Sector Development Unit. He received his BA from the University of Auckland and his PhD in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining the World Bank, he spent four years as an assistant professor of Economics at Stanford University. His main research is on migration, enterprise development, and methodology for use with developing country data. He has published more than 150 articles in leading journals, including work on Mexican migrant selectivity, development impacts of seasonal worker programs in the Pacific, and possible approaches to reduce irregular migration from the Gambia. He is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Migration Studies. He is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
Ayat Nashwan
Dr. Ayat J. Nashwan is an Associate Professor and currently the Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Yarmouk University, in Irbid, Jordan. She was the first female Director of the Refugees, Displaced Persons and Forced Migration Studies Center at Yarmouk University from 2018 to 2019. Dr. Ayat received her PhD in Social Work from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nashwan’s research is focused on Arab immigrant families across their lifespan in the US, and Refugees and forced migrants in Jordan.
Ayhan Kaya
Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University; European Research Council Advanced Grant Holder; Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence; and a member of the Science Academy, Turkey. He has won an ERC Advanced Grant fot the project “Nativism, Islamophobism, and Islamism in the Age of Populism: Culturalisation and Religionization of What is Social, Economic and Political in Europe”. The project will last for 5 years between 2019 and 2024.
Ruben Andersson
Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University’s Department of International Development, working on migration, borders and security. His most recent book is No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (University of California Press, April 2019). Based on research in the sub-Saharan Sahel, along Western borderlines and in a range of other sites, the book reaches across distant conflict zones, and into colonial history, as it draws an anthropological map of the dangers and fears that haunt our politics today. Ruben’s earlier book, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014) gave an ethnographic account of the new social realities generated by Europe’s ‘fight against illegal migration’ along the continent’s southern shores, a theme I have continued to explore in more recent work.
