Recent Faculty Awards

Jon Mercer is a recipient of the 2011 UW Distinguished Teaching Award that recognizes excellence in teaching at the highest levels of the University. 


Christopher Parker won the Ralph Bunche Award for the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Lance Bennett and Alan Borning (Computer Science) have received an award of $733,000 from the NSF Social-Computational Systems Program for a 3 year project titled Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation.

Luis Fraga has been nominated to serve as Vice President of the American Political Science Association (2010-2011).

The Swedish Research Council has selected Lance Bennett to hold the national Olof Palme Chair for next year -- when Lance will be on sabbatical. The Olof Palme Chair was created by the Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen) in 1987. Its purpose is to enable the Swedish Research Council to issue an annual invitation to an outstanding scholar from abroad to take up a visiting professorship at a Swedish university. Lance will be hosted by Stockholm University.

Mark Smith won the 2009 Distinguished Graduate Award from the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

Michael McCann, Shauna Fisher, and William Haltom (UW Pol S grad from 1983) have been awarded the Pi Sigma Alpha Prize for the Best Paper presented at the 2009 annual conference of the Western Political Science Association, for"Criminalizing Big Tobacco: Legal Mobilization, Mass Media, and the Politics
of Responsibility for Health Risks in the United States."

Michael McCann has won a fellowship enabling him to spend 2010-2011 as Visiting Research Scholar with the Law and Public Affairs program at Princeton University. He plans to work on a new book (with George Lovell) tentatively titled "A Union by Law: Filipino Cannery Workers and the Politics of Democratic Aspiration."

Susan Whiting was named a 2009-10 fellow of the Program on Peace, Governance and Development in East Asia at the East Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

Matt Barreto received the Political Research Quarterly's 2009-2010 Outstanding Reviewer Award. The award recognizes individuals who have provided extraordinary service through the number and quality of their reviews.

Lisa P. Jackson, the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, has appointed Aseem Prakash to serve as a member of the Subcommittee on Promoting Environmental Stewardship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology for a term beginning June 29,2009, and ending June 29,2011. Aseem Prakash's mandate is to "represent the views of academics engaged in research on voluntary regulatory programs."

Margaret Levi has been appointed a Commissioner of the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association. In this capacity, she will help coordinate the scholars' group with Robert Nelson, Director, American Bar Foundation.

Paul L. Brass was awarded 2008 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Emeritus Fellowship.These Fellowships are intended to support the scholarly activities of outstanding faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who, at the time of taking up the fellowships, will be officially retired but continue to be active and productive in their fields.

Matt Barreto received a grant of $220,000 from Pew Charitable Trusts to study the new Online Voter Registration system in Washington State. Washington is only the second state in the U.S. to allow online voter registration, and this study will assess the implementation and effectiveness of online registration.

Lance Bennett was awarded the University of Washington 2008 James A. Clowes Award for the Development of Learning Communities

Matt Barreto received a grant from the National Science Foundation for $750,000 to add a Latino oversample to the 2008 American National Election Study (ANES) and translate the survey into Spanish. The 2008 NES is currently in the field, and marks the first time ever it is available in Spanish and carries a Latino oversample.

Rachel Cichowski received the 2008 Best Book Award, American Political Science Association's European Politics and Society Section:  The European Court and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Luis Fraga has been appointed as the co-chair, with Terri Givens of the University of Texas at Austin, of the Task Force on Political Science in the 21st Century, appointed by President Dianne Pinderhughes, APSA.

Luis Fraga has been appointed by Governor Christine Gregoire to serve on the Washington New American Policy Council that will focus on providing guidance to the state as to how it can better integrate immigrants within our civic institutions.

Tony Gill received the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Religion Section for the book The Political Origins of Regligious Liberty.