School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • David D. Laitin

    David D. Laitin

    James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor

    BioDavid D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Somalia and Grenada, where he became national tennis champion in 1970. Back in the US, he received his Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, working under the direction of Ernst Haas and Hanna Pitkin.

    He has taught at three great universities: UCSD (1975-87), the University of Chicago (1987-1999) and now at Stanford. Over his career, as a student of comparative politics, he has conducted field research in Somalia, Yorubaland (Nigeria), Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, and France, all the time focusing on issues of language and religion, and how these cultural phenomena link nation to state. His books include Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998); Nations, States and Violence (2007); Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016); and African Politics Since Independence (2019).

    In collaboration with James Fearon, he has published several papers on ethnicity, ethnic cooperation, the sources of civil war, and on policies that work to settle civil wars. Laitin has also collaborated with Alan Krueger on international terrorism and with Eli Berman on suicide terrorism.

    In 2008-2009, with support from the National Science Foundation, and with a visiting appointment at Sciences-Po Paris, Laitin conducted ethnographic, survey and experimental research on Muslim integration into France, seeking to assess the magnitude of religious discrimination and isolate the mechanisms that sustain it. In collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, they published the results in Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian Heritage Societies (Harvard Press, 2016).

    In 2016, Laitin became co-director of Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, and has co-authored several papers published in "Science", "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and "Nature Human Behavior" that estimate the effects of policy on immigrant integration.

    Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 Laitin was the recipient of the John Skytte Prize in Political Science from the Johan Skytte Foundation in Uppsala University, Sweden.

  • Tanya Marie Luhrmann

    Tanya Marie Luhrmann

    Albert Ray Lang Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHer work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic.