Postdoctoral Fellow (EXPIRED)

Global Innovation Program:

Description

The Global Innovation Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House invites applications for its postdoctoral fellowship program during the 2023-2024 academic year. The Global Innovation Program is the research arm of Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s hub for global engagement and interdisciplinary international policy research. Perry World House connects Penn to the international policy world through research, student engagement, and public programming, bringing the university’s intellectual resources to bear on the urgent global challenges of the 21st century.

We hope to bring several postdoctoral fellows to campus for the 2023-2024 academic year. We are seeking excellent scholars who study global affairs and have interests in interdisciplinary outreach and policy relevance. We are particularly interested in applicants in the following areas:

• The Future of the Global Order: Power, Technology, and Governance
• Global Shifts: Urbanization, Migration, and Climate Change 

The Future of the Global Order

Changes in global economic, military, and technological circumstances are evident in growing concerns around the world about the future of arms control, multilateral economic institutions, technological decoupling, the future of the Islamic State, and more. The post-Cold War global order may be at a tipping point. In addition, systemic trends, such as globalization and climate change, mean that the challenges of today and tomorrow will be global – and require global responses. The role of automated trading algorithms in the 2010 “Flash Crash” in the United States, combined with the specter of drone warfare around the world due and the proliferation of military robotics, highlight how the intersection of technologies, such as cyber and robotics, presents enormous challenges for global business and diplomatic norms. In a time of change, academic research has the potential to shed significant light on these issues and highlight new and important approaches for the global policy community.

In this theme area, Perry World House will focus in part, but not exclusively, on four areas: the impacts of emerging technologies for global politics, shifting global power balances and how they influence both state and non-state actors, the evolution of international legal regimes, and the ability of the international community to sustain effective governing institutions in times of change. We particularly hope to have a postdoctoral fellow as part of our new project on emerging technologies and global politics.

Global Shifts

Today, tens of millions of people move and are regularly displaced around the world through a combination of forces – environmental, societal, political, and security. Human movement and adaptation in response to ever changing catalysts has always been a salient feature of the global landscape.

Whether due to protracted conflict or political unrest, climate change or demographic shifts, human movement is often essential for communities to survive and thrive. Simultaneously, rapid urbanization has made cities home to 70 percent of the world’s population, resulting in a trend toward cities playing increasingly important roles on the world stage and being in the vanguard for global solutions. 

At a moment when the world is seeing the greatest level of displacement since World War II, and the climate emergency grows more acute by the day, these complex and intersecting global phenomena – urbanization, migration, and climate change – demand sophisticated and coordinated action from researchers and policymakers working in concert.

The Global Shifts research theme examines these phenomena, highlights the specific challenges their intersections produce, and charts a path that allows for the best global policy responses to emerge.

Qualifications

There are no mandatory teaching responsibilities. Postdoctoral fellows in the Global Innovation Program will pursue their own research as well as participate in the intellectual life of Perry World House. Postdoctoral fellows will be expected to give a presentation during the academic year in the Perry World House Seminar Series, publish policy relevant scholarship related to Perry World House themes, and attend regularly scheduled seminars. They will also be expected to spend up to 10% of their time contributing to the intellectual environment at Perry World House, including working with Perry World House’s Undergraduate Student Fellows, as well as designing and planning engagements in relevant theme areas. Perry World House will provide mentorship, professional guidance, and introduce each postdoctoral fellow to related faculty and leaders of centers and institutes at the University of Pennsylvania.

Applications are welcome from scholars who have received their Ph.D. or equivalent degrees (including a J.D. in the case of applicants focused on international legal regimes) in the last give academic years, or who expect to complete their degree by June 2023. Applications will be reviewed starting Monday, December 19, 2022. To receive full consideration, applications and letters of recommendation should be received by that date. 

Upon provision of and contingent upon proof of conferral of the Ph.D. degree, all postdoctoral fellow positions pay a stipend of $65,000 plus relevant fees and health insurance. The position also provides $2,000 in research support.

Borders & Boundaries Program

The Borders and Boundaries Project is concerned with boundaries between organized human communities, broadly understood. International borders, border regions and border crossings have multiple significance as designations of state authority, security buffers, expressions of social meaning and opportunities for economic integration. 

Border regions and activities speak to national and local encounters with neighbors and the rest of the world. This project is concerned with how humans demarcate the space between “us” and “them.” It contextualizes border architecture, infrastructure and institutions as expressions of various social, political and economic anxieties associated with globalization. This research team will concern itself with a broad range of questions relating to “bordering” in world politics. The project team is run by Professor Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science, and Business Ethics.

Research Postdoctoral Fellowship

The postdoctoral fellow will split their time between their own research and Borders & Boundaries project research. Postdoctoral fellows will be expected to work 25% of their time on project research. Applicants with an interest in territorial politics; migration and movement across borders; development in and across border regions; border-related law, cooperation, and institutions; transnational crime, human trafficking and law enforcement across borders; and related issues are welcome to apply. Theoretical thinking is highly valued. Skills in empirical spatial analysis, GIS technologies, mapping technologies, experimental analyses, computerized textual and imaging analyses, and similar technologies are a plus, as are computer programming skills and experience using large computer databases and statistical software.

Qualifications

There are no mandatory teaching responsibilities. Postdoctoral fellows will be expected to give a presentation during the academic year in the Perry World House Seminar Series, engage with Perry World House’s Undergraduate Student Fellows, and attend regularly scheduled seminars. Perry World House will also introduce each postdoctoral fellow to related faculty and leaders of centers and institutes at the University of Pennsylvania.

Applications are welcome from scholars who have received their Ph.D. or equivalent degrees since June 2021, or who expect to complete their degree by June 2023. Applications will be reviewed starting Monday, January 2, 2023. To receive full consideration, applications and letters of recommendation should be received by that date.

General Information

Upon provision of and contingent upon proof of conferral of the Ph.D. degree, all postdoctoral fellow positions pay a stipend of $65,000 plus relevant fees and health insurance. The position also provides $2,000 in research support.

Identity & Conflict Lab

The Penn Identity & Conflict (PIC) Lab, led by Professor Nicholas Sambanis at the Department of Political Science of the University of Pennsylvania, seeks exceptional candidates for a one-year, full-time, potentially renewable, residential appointment as a postdoctoral research fellow.  The Lab addresses a broad range of critical questions focused on inter-group conflict and identity politics.  The Lab prioritizes research in three key areas: how social identities shape individual behavior, how conflict affects identities, and what interventions are effective in reducing inter-group conflict.  Both violent and non-violent forms of conflict are considered, ranging from bias, discrimination, and protest to ethnic violence, secessionism and war.  The Lab has several ongoing projects in four thematic areas: (1) native-immigrant conflict with a focus on Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Germany, and Denmark; (2) effects of national identification (patriotism; nationalism) on foreign policy preferences with case applications in Greece, South Korea, China, and the United States; (3) strategies to reduce interethnic conflict and bias with case applications in India, Pakistan, and Greece; and (4) collection and analysis of new data on separatist conflicts worldwide; and prediction of new conflict outbreaks. A variety of methods are used to study these topics, including surveys, survey experiments, field experiments, and quantitative analysis of observational data.  The Lab seeks to integrate substantive and methodological knowledge across the social and behavioral sciences to develop new analytical approaches and new insights into these thematic areas.

Fellows will split their time between their own research and work with Professor Nicholas Sambanis on one or more of the Lab’s ongoing projects.  Innovative new project proposals by fellows can also be considered for funding by the Lab. 

Requirements and Application Information

Job responsibilities will vary depending on the strengths and interests of the successful applicant.  Fellows will be expected to conduct quantitative data analysis to support ongoing Lab projects; co-author papers and reports with the Lab Director and affiliated faculty; assist with drafting grant proposals; prepare IRB applications; compile reports to share with funders; program surveys; collect/clean survey-based data; prepare replication files for published studies; provide summaries of ongoing work for public outreach purposes; prepare slides for public presentations of Lab projects; and help manage the Lab website and seminar series.

Successful applicants will have excellent training in quantitative methods with an emphasis on statistical analysis, survey methods and experimental methods.  Programming skills are desirable.  Applicants should have outstanding organizational and communication skills and prior experience using large databases and different statistical software (including Stata and R).  Applicants should be intellectually curious, ambitious, energetic, and self-motivated; they should be able to work independently, but also as part of a team and be sensitive to the demands of multiple simultaneously ongoing projects; they should be able to multi-task and be willing to travel for fieldwork if necessary. Training in behavioral economics and/or social psychology is a plus as several of the Lab’s projects cross disciplinary boundaries.

There is no formal teaching requirement.  Fellows will be expected to help organize the PIC Lab workshop, which will meet bi-weekly; they will give at least one presentation on their research at the workshop and/or as part of the Perry World House Seminar Series; and will be expected to help organize the Lab’s annual conference.

Compensation and General Information

All postdoctoral fellow positions pay a stipend of $62,000 plus relevant fees and health insurance.

Applications are welcome from scholars who have received their Ph.D. or equivalent degrees since June 2021, or who expect to complete their degree by June 2023.  Applications will be reviewed starting December 15, 2022.  To receive full consideration, application material should be received by that date.