Interdisciplinary

Sovy Phan

ISPS Director's Fellow 2024

Sovy Pham is a sophomore from Atlanta, Georgia majoring in American Studies and Urban Studies. Her primary policy interests include land-use reform, zoning equity, and socio-spatial relations in urbanity. She is also interested in critical cartography and questions of
territory/sovereignty. On campus, she serves on the Yale College Council, plays Saybrook intramural sports, and directs the FOCUS on New Haven program.

Alison Renna

ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Alison Renna is a PhD candidate in Religion and Modernity and the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. As an ISPS Fellow, Renna is researching the effect of the reception of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1904 decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts on the preamble’s status in constitutional law. Through this ISPS fellowship, Renna is researching the consequence of returning the preamble to constitutional interpretation, with a focus on how returning “ourselves and our posterity” as equal stakeholders in US law would re-shape environmental law in the United States.

Doug Rogers

Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests in political and economic anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; the anthropology of religion and ethics; historical anthropology; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories.

James Scott

Sterling Professor of Political Science; Director, Agrarian Studies; Professor of Anthropology

James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Ian Shapiro

Sterling Professor of Political Science; Henry R Luce Director of the MacMillan Center; Adjunct Professor of Law

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004.

Jody Sindelar

Professor of Epidemiology/Public Health and Economics

Dr. Sindelar is a professor of public health and a health economist at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) and Immediate Past Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management within YSPH. In addition, she is a Research Associate at the National Bureau Economic Research, is a Research Fellow at IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor) an Associated Faculty at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, and has been the President of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon).

Stephen Skowronek

Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political & Social Science

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He is currently the Wynant Visiting Professor at the Rothermere American Institute, Balliol College Oxford. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Adora Svitak

ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Adora Svitak is a PhD student in the joint program in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is interested in gender, power, and intimate life, particularly relationships as processes of contestation over justice and social structures. Her research projects have touched topics including discourse about female orgasm, “heteropessimism” in contemporary literary fiction, and police officers’ wives on Instagram. Prior to Yale, she worked in communications for the non-profit that operates Wikipedia. She received her B.A.

Nisheeth Vishnoi

A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science

Professor Nisheeth Vishnoi’s research spans several areas of theoretical computer science: from approximability of NP-hard problems, to combinatorial, convex and non-convex optimization, to tackling algorithmic questions involving dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and polynomials.