Political Science: Continued Excellence
As we near the end of another academic year, we are reminded how the end of a year often marks transitions of one kind or another. This newsletter highlights some of these along with features about our department's history, the Washington Center D.C. internship program, our highly successful political theory graduate program, and a staff spotlight of Susanne Recordon our Graduate Program Assistant.
One positive force for change in the academic world is... Read more
In the 1970’s William Burke was a program director at the University of Massachusetts but he had a grander vision: to create a Washington, D.C., internship program that would connect students to internships and provide them with housing and academic credit at their home institution. He founded a non-profit, The Washington Center (TWC), to provide that service to universities throughout the world. In 1977 the University of Washington Political Science Department became a partner to TWC. Since... Read more
What is justice? Why have government? What makes a good life? Political theory is the field of big questions, the part of political science that keeps us debating the fundamentals of ethics, politics, and society, that keeps us in touch with traditions of moral reflection extending from Plato’s academy to Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic to Locke’s defenses of toleration and the right to revolution. Made up of three core faculty members, the political theory subfield at the University of... Read more
The excellence of today’s Department of Political Science may not have been foretold by our inauspicious beginning when J. Allen Smith—the namesake of Smith Hall on campus—came to the UW as the Professor of Political Economy in 1897. By 1911 the Department of Political and Social Sciences had four members, all male. An assistant professor of economics was added two years later for the lofty sum of $1,500 per year. A then recent Ph.D. of the department, the first female hire, was also named a... Read more
Professor George Lovell teaches American politics and law. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, he taught at the University of Maryland and College of William and Mary before coming to the University of Washington in 2001.
Professor Lovell’s research focuses on how political institutions and law shape the way people organize for political action. For example, his book Legislative Deferrals showed how workers in the early 20th century struggled to end judicial... Read more