With a six-year hiring freeze lifted, the Department of Political Science has launched a veritable hiring binge, landing 11 new faculty members -- one at the senior level, 10 at the junior level.

It has also awarded tenure to a member of its junior faculty -- Cathy Cohen, a specialist on African American politics -- and has other senior appointments under consideration. (See related story, below.)

The new faculty include John E. Roemer, director of the Program on Economy, Justice and Society at the University of California at Davis; José Antonio Cheibub, the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania; Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, a visiting researcher at the Czech Academy of Science, Institute of Sociology; and Kenneth F. Scheve Jr., a research assistant in Harvard's Department of Government.

The number of Yale's political science majors has roughly doubled in the past five years, and Ian Shapiro, chair of the department, hopes to continue adding to the roster of 38 faculty members.

The choice of the eight men and three women recruited to Yale reflect the department's "Rethinking Political Order" initiative, a 1999 effort that is reshaping the teaching of political science at Yale.

The initiative focuses on the reality of American domination of a post-Cold War world and the new challenges to nation statehood. In this conception, the traditional division of political science into the separate areas of American Politics, Political Theory, Comparative Politics and International Relations now takes a back seat to a problem-driven approach that is open to all methodologies and students of all parts of the world.

"Rather than engage in method-driven political science, it makes more sense to start with a problem..." Shapiro wrote in a recent article in The New York Times. In particular, the department will focus on such problems of the new world order as the inequality of wealth and volatile ethnic
hostilities.

One way the initiative aims to achieve its goals is to divide the subject of political science into five new categories: Order, Conflict and Violence; Representation and Popular Rule; Distributive Politics; Identities, Affiliations and Allegiances; and Crafting and Operating Institutions. Among its advantages, this topical perspective on political and institutional dynamics enables a broader understanding of the impact of rapidly changing conditions -- from the accelerating accessibility of information to environmental hazards that know no political boundaries, according to Shapiro.

"This approach is motivated by the conviction that the traditional organization of the political science discipline, while valuable for some purposes, confronts limitations in the face of today's challenges," reads the department's initiative.

With that in mind, Shapiro says he sought faculty members "who are concerned with the problems of the world rather than the methodological debates that consume the journals but concern no one else."

The following are brief profiles of the eight men and three women who will join the department.

John E. Roemer, the only new senior appointment to the department, is coming from the University of California, Davis, where he been the director of the Program on Economy, Justice and Society since 1988. Roemer has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University and a doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. His outstanding record as a scholar and teacher includes many professional honors and awards and a number of competitive research grants -- two from the MacArthur Foundation. A noted authority on Marxist economic and political theory, he is author or co-author of seven published books and numerous articles. "Roemer's appointment is under the rubric of 'Distributive Politics,' although some of his recent scholarship also bears on 'Representation and Popular Rule,' wrote Shapiro, explaining which of the newly designated areas of study Roemer will be covering.

Jose Antonio Cheibub, a native of Brazil, has a bachelor's degree from Fluminese University, Rio de Janeiro, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. His most recent appointment was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was assistant professor of political science from 1995­98 and since 1995, the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences. He is a co-author of the forthcoming, "Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-Being in the World, 1950­1990." "His work contributes principally in the area of 'Crafting and Operating Institutions,'" wrote Shapiro. "His principal focus is on the causes and consequences of different institutional arrangements (e.g. parliamentarism v. presidentialism) and the conditions that contribute to, and detract from, the survival of democratic arrangements."

Keith Darden, who holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, is expected to receive his doctorate from the latter school this year. His research has been concerned with the former Soviet republics' decisions to join customs unions and also with the ideological factors that contribute to allegiances of policy elites. These areas of interest make it appropriate for him to teach both in the "Distributive Politics" (the distribution of wealth) and the "Identities, Affiliations and Allegiances" (which covers a range of human attachments, including political, ethnic and institutional) categories.

Anna M. Grzymala-Busse's most recent appointment was as a visiting researcher at the Czech Academy of Science, Institute of Sociology. Previously she had been affiliated with the Central European University, Hungary, and the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, among other institutions in Europe. She has also been a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1992, her M.Phil from Cambridge University in 1993 and her Ph.D. in 1995 from the Department of Government at Harvard.

Gregory A. Huber, who is expected to get his doctorate this year from Princeton University, holds master's and bachelor's degrees from Emory University. A Robert Hartley Fellowship to the Brookings Institution and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship are among the academic honors that have been awarded to him. "His interests in bureaucratic politics will broaden our current offerings..." wrote Shapiro. "His study of OSHA explores a hitherto unnoticed aspect of bureaucratic politics with important theoretical implications for our understanding of regulatory provision," he amplified.

Anastassios Kalandrakis, a native of Patras, Greece, holds a bachelor's degree from Athens University of Economics and Business and master's and doctorate degrees from the department of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he has been a research assistant since 1997. His research has focused on a comparison of governing coalitions in different electoral systems, and he has explored the relative influence on coalitions from different institutional rules. These areas of interest would come under the rubric of "Representation" and "Crafting and Operating Institutions," according to Shapiro.

John S. Lapinski, with degrees from Seattle Pacific University and the University of Chicago, recently earned his doctorate from Columbia University and joined the Yale faculty last fall. He will teach courses in the increasingly popular field of American politics, particularly on Congress, American political development (APD) and methods. "He has written on Congressional committees, presidential vetoes and the early American military," commented Shapiro. "His work seeks to shift the focus of APD scholarship from the Executive to the Congress and in this he stands on the cutting edge of APD research."

Ellen Lust-Okar is a scholar of the Middle East who is particularly conversant in the political dynamics, both domestic and foreign, of that region. Her dissertation, from the University of Michigan, focused on how domestic politics affects foreign policy choices of Middle Eastern countries, and she has written extensively on opposition politics within those countries as well as tensions among them -- particularly with Israel. Lust-Okar, who speaks Arabic fluently and holds two master's degrees -- one in political science, the other in Middle Eastern and North Africa studies -- has been the recipient of many grants and prestigious fellowships for her research. "[I]t is rare for so junior a scholar to have completed high-quality work in so many areas," noted Shapiro.

Jennifer Pitts is a 1992 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale who is expected to receive her doctorate from Harvard this term. "Her work," wrote Shapiro, "contributes in both the areas of 'Order, Conflict and Violence,' since it is concerned with justifications of imperialism, and 'Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances,' since it deals with building allegiance for liberal ideas at home by supporting illiberal ones abroad." She is an authority on Tocqueville, and has written about his support for imperialism in Algeria for the prestigious Journal of Political Philosophy. "Tocqueville on Empire and Slavery," which she both edited and translated, is being published by Johns Hopkins Press.

Kenneth F. Scheve Jr. is also receiving his doctorate from the department of government at Harvard, where he has been a research assistant since 1995. He received his bachelor's degree in economics, phi beta kappa, from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to his outstanding academic work in comparative politics and international relations, he has been a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley & Co. and, for two years, a teacher at an alternative elementary and secondary school in Kansas City, Missouri. "He stands out in intelligence, command of his subject, methodological sophistication, originality, seizure of a research frontier, ability to address and engage an audience, and breadth," Shapiro wrote. His work will fall within the "Distributive Politics" category of the initiative.

James Raymond Vreeland is finishing his doctorate in political science at New York University, where he has also earned a master's degree. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Manhattan College in 1994. Shapiro had this to say of the new hire: "Vreeland impressed the department with his skills at quantitative analysis and mathematical modeling on the one hand and his substantive knowledge of institutional and case-studies appropriately drawn from many different geographic regions on the other."