Faculty Directory

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Dr. Cyrenne is a Political Scientist and Managing Director of the MA Programs in the Social Sciences. He teaches courses in the history of political thought, with a particular focus on the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as seminars in contemporary political philosophy. For more information, please visit his homepage.

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Dr. Gross is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology. Her research interests include the politics of affect and emotion, performative hierarchy and masculinity, and parastate sovereignty in the context of India’s young democracy. She currently focuses on caste-based political movements that demonstrate the generative tensions between community and nation-state, and between yearning for the glories of the imagined past and living with the perpetual disappointments of unfulfilled desires borne by global capitalism. For more information, please visit her homepage.

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Dr. Lee is an Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, teaching undergraduate courses in principles of microeconomics and intermediate microeconomics. Min Lee holds a BA in economics from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

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Dr. Jean is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Sociology.  He specializes in education research and quantitative methods.  

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Dr. Brianne A. Painia is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Sociology. Her research interests include black femininities and masculinities, black feminism, and black religion with an emphasis on gender performance within black religious spaces.

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Dr. Anshumali recently completed his PhD in Development Sociology and also holds an MS in the same field from Cornell University. In his dissertation, Amit examined the effect of men’s non-farm employment on women’s economic roles in rural India, as mediated by class, caste, and education. Prior to writing his dissertation, Amit also completed a dual MS in Environmental Sciences and Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from The Ohio State University. Amit has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Technology from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. He has three years of experience working as a production supervisor in a chemical manufacturing unit in Greater Mumbai, India. For more information, please visit his homepage.

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Dr. Bourne is an MA Teaching Fellow in Sociology. Her current research uses a regression discontinuity approach to evaluate the decarcerative impact of several recent reforms in criminal legal practice in Chicago. More broadly, she aims to define the conditions under which the authority of criminal law enforcement may be democratically legitimate. Might these conditions be achieved through incremental reform, or do they require entirely new criminal legal institutions? For more information, please visit her homepage.

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Dr. Gugwor is an MA Teaching Fellow of Comparative Human Development (CHD). He earned his MA in comparative human development in 2016, his MA in the social sciences from MAPSS in 2013, and his BA in psychology from Northeastern Illinois University in 2012. His research interests focus on identity and action across political/educational contexts and through the use of quantitative and qualitative methods he is able to demonstrate both the breadth and depth of these identity processes. For more information, please visit his homepage.

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Dr. Xu is an MA Teaching Fellow in Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is interested in economic development, institutional change and state-business relations. His dissertation examines the rise of tech entrepreneurship in China, whose statist political economy is often thought to hinder private business, and its impact on the development of China's high-tech industries. He is also working on a project on how and the extent to which China's top business elites can sustain their material wealth under single-party rule. For more information, please visit his homepage.

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Dr. Bolling is a MAPSS preceptor in Psychology. She earned a PhD in Neuroscience from Yale University, where she used human neuroimaging methods to study social cognition, emotion regulation and decision making in adults and youth with and without neurodevelopmental disorders. She holds an MSc in Psychodynamic Developmental Neuroscience from University College London and a BA in Psychology from Cornell University. Dr. Bolling previously worked as a staff editor for the journal PLOS ONE.