School of Humanities and Sciences
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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. -
Licheng Liu
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioLicheng Liu is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Political Science and Statistics at MIT in May 2024.
Licheng specializes in Political Methodology and International Political Economy. He works on proposing new methods for casual inference with longitudinal and network data using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, and their applications in empirical studies like trade politics and comparative political behavior. -
Simon Sihang Luo
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioSimon Sihang Luo is a political theorist whose work focuses on comparative political theory, contemporary political theory, and radicalism. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Simon’s current book project investigates the multiple uses of the memories of the Cultural Revolution in theoretical debates in the contemporary Chinese intellectual sphere. By tracing the genealogy of Cultural Revolution memories in post-Mao China, the book project demonstrates how political actors holding different ideological positions make the Cultural Revolution a usable past as they articulate different visions of China’s political future. By so doing, the book project analyzes how the past is useful for democratic and antidemocratic politics in a rapidly changing society, and how narratives of a revolutionary historical event constitute a repertoire of political knowledge for the public sphere.
Simon has published scholarly articles about democratic theory and global encounters of ideas. In public writings in both English and Chinese, Simon has written about the history of political thought, political emotions, historical interpretations, labor politics, and the transnational dissemination of political knowledge.
Simon has taught multiple courses, in various roles, in political theory, Chinese politics, American politics, and ethics. At Stanford, Simon will continue to bring his research interests to the pressing issues in domestic and global politics of our age in his classroom, and offer courses related to political memories, citizenship, radical political theory, and the rise of China.
