Quick LinksDepartment of Political Science 469 Kerr Hall (530) 752-0966 (530) 752-8666 fax
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Our program has been quite successful in placing our graduates. Since 2000, almost all of our graduates from the PhD program have received tenure-track appointments in a variety of academic institutions. Most of these students received offers during their final year in the program while completing their degree and in their first year on the job market. Below you will find profiles of some recent graduates and a list of recent placements.
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Skyler Cranmer (PhD, 2007) is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Skyler’s primary interest is in political methodology, in which he is conducting research
in Bayesian statistics (particularly multiple change point estimation and reversible jump MCMC), missing
data imputation, complex network analysis, and automated data gathering and content analysis. He spent
2006-07 as a visiting pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social
Science and then remained there during 2007-08 as a post-doctoral fellow. He has recent articles in
Conflict Management and Peace Science, "Do Governments of the Left Attract more Terrorism than
Governments of the Right?" (with Michael T. Koch) and the Journal of Politics, "Demography,
Democracy and Disputes: The Search for the Elusive Relationship Between Population Growth and International
Conflict" (with Randolph M. Siverson).
Elizabeth Simas (PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston.
Her research uses both survey and experimental methodologies to explore the way candidates and voters
behave in electoral campaigns, with a particular emphasis on the U.S. House. Among her achievements as
a graduate student are a grant from the Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences and the Dean's
Doctoral Fellowship for Excellence in Research. She is currently working on a number of projects, with
working papers on the predictability and impact of candidate issue statements, partisan projection and
bias in the assessment of candidate positions, and the individual effects of elite level polarization.
Elizabeth's work as appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics,
and Political Research Quarterly. 
Zeynep Somer-Topcu (PhD, 2009) is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with a
joint appointment in the Political Science Department and at the Max Kade Center of European and
German Studies. Her research and teaching interests include a broad array of issues in comparative
politics and institutions. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, American
Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of
Comparative Politics. She is currently working on several papers examining political parties'
policy changes in response to public opinion shifts and the consequences of these policy shifts on
public opinion, election outcomes, cabinet formation and duration, and party leadership survival
in both Western and Eastern and Central European democracies.
Jim Zink (PhD, 2010) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at North Carolina State
University. Jim’s primary research is in the history of political thought, with a special emphasis on early American
political thought, Anglo-American constitutional theory, and the problems and possibilities of liberalism. He also
maintains a secondary research agenda that explores some of the practical implications of ideas in the history of
political thought, including experimental research in perceptions of judicial legitimacy. His recent publications
include: “Reconsidering the Role of Self-Respect in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice” (Journal of Politics, 2011),
“The Language of Liberty and Law: James Wilson on America’s Written Constitution” (American Political Science Review,
2009), and “Courting the Public: Judicial Behavior and Individuals’ Views of Court Decisions” (with John Scott and
James Spriggs, Journal of Politics, 2009). His current projects include a critical analysis of the idea of a bill of
rights from the perspective of American founding-era statesman James Wilson and an essay on the political importance
of self-efficacy in the thought of Rousseau and Rawls.