Board of Directors and Principal Investigators

July 2014 co-PI meeting, Provo, Utah

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Principal Investigators

Valerie M. Hudson, Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, has researched national security affairs, foreign policy analysis, and gender in international relations. Hudson has authored numerous publications, including Sex and World Peace (with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett; Columbia University Press, 2012), and Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (with Andrea Den Boer, MIT Press 2004), which won the Association of American Publishers Award for best book and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for best book in social demography. She is a recipient of the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Teaching Award, served as president of the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the International Studies Association, and for eight years directed the graduate program in international relations at the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University. Hudson received a PhD from the Ohio State University, and has taught previously at Northwestern, Rutgers, and Brigham Young Universities.

 

Chad F. Emmett, an associate professor of geography at Brigham Young University, specializes in political geography and the geography of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with much of his research focused on the status of Christians in the Islamic world. Emmett speaks Arabic and Indonesian and has traveled and researched widely in both regions. His publications include Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth (University of Chicago Press 1995) and other works that explore possible ways in which the city of Jerusalem can be peacefully shared, how varying methods of sharing sacred places can be used as models for sharing political space, and the role of Palestinian Christians in the Palestinian nationalist movement. In addition to WomanStats, he is working on a similar project that will be used to analyze the status of Christians in countries with a Muslim majority. Emmett received a PhD from the University of Chicago, and in 2014 was awarded a General Education Professorship at BYU.

 

Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, researches in the areas of political psychology, American foreign policy, and international relations theory. McDermott has authored Risk Taking in International Relations: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy and Political Psychology in International Relations as well as numerous articles on experimentation in political science. She recently completed a series of experiments funded by the Department of Defense on sex differences in aggression. In 2000, she was the recipient of the Erik Erikson Award for distinguished early career contribution from the International Society of Political Psychology and has been a John M. Olin national security postdoctoral fellow and a Women and Public Policy postdoctoral fellow, both at Harvard University. McDermott received a PhD from Stanford University.

 

Mary Caprioli, an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota—Duluth, Head of the Department of Political Science and Director of the International Relations Program, has researched the role of gendered structural inequality on political conflict and violence, including interstate/intrastate violence and security issues broadly defined to include human rights. Caprioli has published articles in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, International Security, and the Journal of Peace Research, and is writing two books. From 1999–2004, she was an associate editor for International Studies Perspectives. Her work has highlighted the need for cross-national data on women that captures the full extent of inequality relative to each society. She has been awarded several research grants and her expertise has been sought by the World Bank, UNIFEM, and the Africa Peace Forum. She brings experience in data development and is an advisory board member of the Minorities at Risk Project. Caprioli received a PhD from the University of Connecticut.

 

Andrea den Boer, a lecturer in international politics at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, researches in the area of ethics, women’s rights, and gender in international relations. Her publications include a co-authored book with Valerie Hudson (Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, MIT Press 2004), articles on women’s rights and the effectiveness of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and writings on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Her current research examines issues related to violence against women in Asian states. She is an associate editor of Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations. Den Boer received her PhD from the University of Kent.

 

Donna Lee Bowen is a Professor of Political Science and Middle East Studies at BYU where she teaches courses in comparative politics, Middle East politics, Middle East area studies, and gender politics. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Professor Bowen writes on the intersection of religion, tradition and politics in the Middle East and has authored articles and a forthcoming book on attempts to construct policy which reflects Muslim sensibilities, specifically social policy concerning family planning and abortion. Her edited book, Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (with Evelyn A. Early), is widely used in universities and a third edition of this popular work is in press. She is currently working on research determining the relationship between family law and state peacefulness.

She has traveled, lived and researched in North Africa and the Middle East, has held two Fulbright grants to Morocco and Tunisia, and also received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the David M. Kennedy Center.

Professor Bowen has served in numerous administrative capacities at BYU, as well as nationally and internationally. The positions include Faculty Coordinator of the Middle East Studies/Arabic program in the David M. Kennedy Center for International Affairs; Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America; the offices of Treasurer, Vice President and Board of Directors of the American Institute of Maghrib Studies. She currently serves on the advisory board of BYU Studies and TALIM, the Tangier American Legation Museum. In addition to her academic work, she has completed consulting projects on aspects of population, politics, development and women’s status for the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the United States Agency for International Development.

She is married to James R. Barnes, professor emeritus, Department of Zoology, BYU. They are the parents of three daughters and grandparents to 11 grandchildren.

 

Perpetua Lynne Nielsen, an associate teaching professor of Statistics at Brigham Young University (BYU), joined the WomanStats Project in fall 2012 after co-writing a Politics and Gender journal article with Valerie Hudson and Donna Lee Bowen. Her research interests are in the area women’s situation in clan-based societies, clans and the rule of law, mentoring women in higher education, Statistics education, classical test theory, and blended learning in large distance education courses. Prior to her BYU faculty appointment, Nielsen worked for: the Philippine government conducting nationwide surveys to measure the socio-economic impact of electrification on rural households and small businesses, Intel as a statistical process control consultant, and SkyMall as a market research director. Nielsen received a BS in Mathematics from the University of the Philippines, an MS in Statistics from Brigham University and is currently a PhD candidate in Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU.

 

Catalina Monroy is a teacher in the Politics and International Relations program at the Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá, Colombia. She received her PhD in the program of Political Studies at the University Externado de Colombia, Bogotá where she focused mainly in Colombian and Latin American security issues. She is a researcher in security, foreign policy and, since her affiliation to the WomanStats Project in july 2012, she teaches gender and security (the first gender and security course in Colombia) and researches in this area with several Colombian students. She is currently writing a paper on the WomanStats Project also, she is aiming to expand the WomanStats Project to the entire Latin American region.

 

Senem Ertan is an assistant professor in the Political Science Faculty at Ankara Social Sciences University in Ankara, Turkey. She received her PhD from the University of Siena in 2013, after receiving her M.A. in Global Political Economy from the University of Kassel, Germany and her B.A. in International Relations from the Ege University, Turkey. She has published an article about Laicism and State building in Turkey in Interdisciplinary Political Studies and some book reviews in Political Studies Review and Peripherie: Zeitschrift für Politik und Ökonomie in der dritten Welt on the topics of Women’s Humans Rights and Religion & Politics. Her current research interests include gender equality policies, women’s rights in Muslim countries, religion and politics, and comparative research. She has been affiliated to the WomanStats Project since September 2011 whilst completing a research period at the Brigham Young University for her dissertation on gender equality policies in Muslim countries.

 

Juan Pablo Vallejo is a Consultant for the Climate Change and Sustainability Division of the Inter-American Development Bank in Bogotá, Colombia. He is also teacher of Environmental Economics and Sustainable Development. Juan Pablo received an MS on Environmental Management from Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is currently working on a research project that explores the effects of climate change in Colombia from a gender perspective.

 

S. Matthew Stearmer has been affiliated with the WomanStats Project since 2001, and was instrumental in developing the original database. Stearmer's current research interests examine the intersection between migration, minority group organization, and violence. He is especially interested in how structural level effects increase the risk of violence within society, and how these structures differentially affect the violence women and men experience. Prior research has examined historical sex-ratios on the American frontier, policy effects on breast-feeding, the development of a comparative international rape scale, and tracking social movements (including women's organizations) via Twitter. Stearmer is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The Ohio State University, having received a BA in International Studies, an MS in Geography, and an MS in Sociology at Brigham Young University.

 

Rebecca Nielsen is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Yale University and an alumna of Brigham Young University, where she started working with WomanStats in 2007. Her dissertation project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Yale MacMillan Center, examines the consequences of civil war for women’s networks and political participation. She has conducted several years of field research on female secret societies in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Liberia.

 

Emeritus

Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, is professor emeritus of psychology at Brigham Young University where she directed the Women’s Research Institute. She is a fellow in both the American Psychological Association (1984) and the Association for Psychological Science (1987). After twenty-five years as a professor and department chair in the graduate school of Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City, Ballif-Spanvill returned to her alma mater in 1994. In addition to her professional papers and publications that address motivation and emotion, the impact of domestic violence on children, and techniques to break intergenerational cycles of violence, she is the coeditor of A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women; and coauthor of both Sex and World Peace, which demonstrates that security of women is a vital factor in state’s incidence of conflict and war; and PEACEABILITIES: Compelling Stories and Activities that Develop Abilities of Children to Live Peacefully with Others.