North Hall News

By Emily Sellars, UW-Madison Ph.D. 2015

Emily Sellars is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. She came to Yale in 2018 after a postdoc at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and two years on the faculty at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government.

I am happy to hear about the rebirth of “North Hall News”!

I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. I came to Yale in 2018 after a postdoc at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and two years on the faculty at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government. All of these places have been wonderful in different ways, but I miss Madison. (Yale’s campus is beautiful, but it is not adjacent to a lake, and there’s nothing quite like the Memorial Union Terrace anywhere else.)

Most of my current projects build on ideas that I was working on while at Wisconsin. I am finishing a book on the politics of emigration, building on my dissertation research on rural politics in Mexico. The book examines how the possibility of individual emigration from Mexico complicated community collective action, making it easier for the government to avoid undertaking difficult political and economic reforms. This project benefited greatly from the feedback of Badgers from across campus during my time in Madison. In addition to the amazing grad students and faculty in North Hall, I owe a debt of gratitude to scholars in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and at LACIS for getting me interested in studying Mexico.

A different stream of research started in Madison has proven more topical than I anticipated in the intervening years. In a series of papers with Jennifer Alix-Garcia, a former Wisconsin faculty member now at Oregon State, we explore the long- and short-run implications of pandemics on political and economic institutions in Mexico from the sixteenth century to the present. One of the things that our research illustrates is that the long-term economic and demographic legacies of disease outbreaks evolve over time as a result of subsequent political choices, an important lesson for today. In a related paper with Francisco Garfias of UCSD, we examine how epidemics can create opportunities for official corruption, another sadly relevant lesson.

In a third set of projects, Francisco and I have been examining the connection between domestic conflict, economic shocks, and state building, focusing on colonial and postcolonial Mexico. Though this research agenda started after my time at Wisconsin, I actually met Francisco at a workshop organized by Jennifer in Madison when he and I were grad students, so there is a UW connection there, too.

One thing that unites these projects is the historical focus. It has been fun to see the growth of historical political economy research since I graduated, something that I did not anticipate when I was spending late nights with dusty books in my beloved “cage” in Memorial Library. In the last couple of years, I have had a lot of fun contributing to the Broadstreet blog alongside my excellent co-editors (including another former Badger, Scott Gehlbach). Those who overlapped with me at Wisconsin will probably recognize a few names of contributors of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy.

In terms of personal news, Andrew and I welcomed a son in mid-March 2020 in a locked-down hospital in New Haven. Isaac is a true pandemic baby. Though he has not yet had the pleasure of visiting Madison, we have been showing him videos of Bucky dancing at basketball games and doing push-ups at football games to prepare for a future trip.

Now that I have spent time in a few other departments, I am even more grateful for the time that I spent in North Hall and in Madison. It is hard to find an environment that is both as welcoming and as intellectually challenging as the one that I enjoyed in grad school. I learned so much from my committee members, colleagues, classmates, and friends. I enjoyed catching up with some of you at APSA last fall and hope to see others of you soon.