Sophie Lemiere is a Political Anthropologist at the Ash Center for Democracy in the Democracy in Hard Places program. She has been awarded the Stanford-NUS 2018-2019 Lee King Chiang Fellow and will be at Stanford in the fall then Singapore in the spring.

Her research looks at the nexus between religion, politics and criminality in a comparative perspective, focussing upon the deep structure of political systems. She received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France, her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. Her Masters research on the apostasy controversies and Islamic civil society was awarded the second prize for International Young Scholar from the ISIM, Leiden in 2007. She has held research positions at RSIS-NTU in 2011 then at ARI in 2012 and has been visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Columbia. Sophie believes it is essential for academics to disseminate their research to a wide audience, and primarily in the countries they study. With this idea in mind, she has oriented her efforts towards the publication of original scholarship addressing both a general and academic audience within and outside of Malaysia. With this in mind, Sophie Lemière is the editor of a series “Malaysian Politics and People”. The first volume Misplaced Democracy was released in 2014, the second volume Illusions of democracy was published in 2017 and will be re-published in 2018 by Amsterdam University Press; the third volume is expected for 2019. Her monograph “Gangsters and Masters: Complicit Militancy and Authoritarian Politics” will be published also 2019. Sophie currently works on a political biography of Mahathir campaign “The Last Game: Malaysian Politics in the Eye of Mahathir”.

She has made considerable efforts to give visibility to Malaysian Studies by publishing in both international academic and non-academic outlets, Sophie has a blog on Mediapart and regularly contributes to publications such as New Mandala, The Conversation, Le Monde, Libération.

Sophie has also started to develop several documentary projects with French production companies, including a series on the Arts and Politics. Her first film 9/43 featured the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar and was selected among the 25 best movies of the French short-film festival ‘Infracourt’ in 2016.

Carlos Lastra-Anadon is a postdoctoral research fellow at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford and an incoming Assistant Professor at IE University in Madrid, Spain. He recently completed his PhD in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political economy and policy, particularly education policy.

His work has been concerned with understanding what sustains and enhances robust human capital formation and the role that the political process may play in facilitating or impeding its development in different contexts.

Over the last 20 years or so, the skills that countries have been investing in since World War II such as universal K-12 are becoming insufficient due to automation and delocalization of production and a job market inequality into highly rewarding high-skilled jobs and manual jobs. What drives successful nations, subnational units and companies to use education to tackle that challenge?

He studies the role that politics broadly understood plays in these dynamics. This includes the jurisdictional configurations and institutions (such as decentralization in school districts and funding rules). I have also focused on the effect public and interest groups can have on holding governments to account to ensure the quality of public services through the ballot box and public opinion, and on the types of nongovernmental actors and other reforms that can help in raising standards and developing new types of skills. 

His project at TEC with Prof Kenneth Scheve tries to understand the characteristics and political drivers of the development of higher education in the United States since the 1960s.

Alison McQueen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.  Alison's book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.  Alison is starting a third book project on treason in the history of political thought. Her other ongoing research projects explore applications of computational text analysis methods in political theory, and the ethics and politics of catastrophe.

Akihisa Makino is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2018-19.  Makino has been working since 2008 for the Japan Patent Office, one of the external agencies of the Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) of Japan, as a patent examiner, handling applications in the fields of polymer and medical science.  From 2016 to 2018, he was also in charge of the policy planning of supporting the intellectual property in universities and research institutions at the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED).