ABOUT ME
I currently serve as the Dean of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, a distinctive academic unit that includes the School of Criminal Justice and the Departments of Political Science and of Public Administration and Policy, as well as several outstanding research institutes and centers.
At the University at Albany, I served as the director of undergraduate studies from 2018-2020, as chair of the Department of Political Science from 2011-2017, and as director of the graduate program in political science from 2008-2011.
I am currently working on two book projects, one on citizenship and civic membership in the context of military service in the United States between the Civil War and World War I, and a second on the Roberts Court.
In May 2024 I will complete a four-year term as a co-editor of the American Political Science Review. I served as President of the Western Political Science Association in 2016-17. In the American Political Science Association I have also served as a member of APSA’s executive council, president of the Law and Courts and Sexuality and Politics Sections, chairing the LGBT Status Committee, serving on prize and award committees and executive councils for Law and Courts, Interpretive Methods and Methodologies, and Politics and History, and organizing panels for Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence. The Law and Courts section honored me in 2015 with its annual Teaching and Mentoring Award. I have also served on several journals’ editorial boards and presently serve on the boards of Polity, the Journal of Law and Courts, and Politics, Groups and Identities. In 2017, I was named a Collins Fellow at the University at Albany, SUNY, recognizing my service to the institution.
My partner since 1996, Joel Bloom, is the Director of Assessment at Hunter College. We have three children, all of whom earned or are earning their degrees at public universities (go Stony Brook Sea Wolves and Temple Owls)!