Salvatore Babones is an associate professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than two dozen academic research articles. His two main areas of academic research are the political economy of the greater China region and the methodology of quantitative modeling in the social sciences. He also publishes extensively on American social and foreign policy.

Salvatore Babones is interested in understanding the structure of the Chinese, Asian, and global economies. He is currently studying how China's New Silk Road policies fit into the geoeconomics of the larger world-system. He maintains a strong second research stream on quantitative methodology for the social sciences. His substantive research takes a longue durée approach to elucidating the macro-level structure of the world-economy, with a particular focus on China's global economic integration. ​

He studied for his PhD with Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi and is strongly associated with the world-systems school of comparative sociology.

He also writes on quantitative methodology for the social sciences.

Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has conducted research on industrial, commercial, and land tenure policies in West Africa. Her work has been funded by the SSRC, Fulbright, the World Bank, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the ACLS, and the Long Chair in Democratic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. ​ She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930 -1985 (Cambridge, 1992), Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), and Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), which is a study of variation in patterns of land-related conflict in subnational regions of East and West Africa. This book won APSA's 2016 Luebbert Book Award for best book in Comparative Politics. ​

Boone has served as member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association (ASA), 2009-2012, chair of the ASA Publications Committee, (2011-2012), member of the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association, member APSA's Comparative Politics Section Executive Council, and Chair of the Political Economy Organized Section of APSA (2014-2016).

​She current serves as co-chair of the APSA-ASA Africa Initiative and is a member of the advisory board of the SSRC African Peacebuilding Network. Previously, she was the Secretary of the African Politics Conference Group, and Treasurer and President of the West African Research Association (2005-8), which oversees the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal.

Melani Cammett is Professor of Government at Harvard University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Belfer Center's Middle East Initiative. ​

​She specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East and North Africa and is the author of four books: (with Ishac Diwan, Alan Richards, and John Waterbury), A Political Economy of the Middle East (2015); Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (2014); (coedited with Lauren Morris MacLean), The Politics of Nonstate Welfare (2014); and Globalization and Business Politics in North Africa: A Comparative Perspective (2007, 2010).

She has received fellowships and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research and Comparative Politics Sections of the American Political Science Association, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the US Institute of Peace, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and other organizations, and has published numerous articles in scholarly and policy journals. ​ Her current research focuses on the politics of welfare and development and she has several ongoing projects on governance and the delivery of social services by public, private, and nonstate actors, the historical roots of economic and social development patterns, and identity politics in the Middle East and North Africa.

Patrick Heller is a professor of sociology and international studies at Brown University and the director of the Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute. His main area of research is the comparative study of social inequality and democratic deepening. He is the author of The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Cornell 1999) and co-author of Social Democracy and the Global Periphery (Cambridge 2006). He has published articles on urbanization, comparative democracy, social movements, development policy, civil society and state transformation.

His most recent book - Bootstrapping Democracy (Stanford 2011) with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcelo Silva - explores politics and institutional reform in Brazilian municipalities. Heller has also done research on urban transformation in South Africa and built a data base on spatial transformation of the post-apartheid city. He spent 2012-2013 in India doing research on slums, urban citizenship and service delivery. He teaches Theory and Research in Development (DEVL 2000), Recent Sociological Theory (SOC 2050), Comparative Political Sociology (SOC 2970) and Globalization and Social Conflict (SOC 1620).

Sam Hickey is Professor of Politics and Development at the University of Manchester and joint Director of Research within the DFID-funded Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre. He is also Associate Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute and Research Director at the Global Development Institute, where ESID is based. Sam’s research interests include the links between politics and development, including issues of state capacity and elite commitment; natural resource governance; social exclusion and adverse incorporation; citizenship participation and NGOs; the politics of social protection and social justice.

Within ESID, Sam is coordinating a project that will investigate the implications of oil for governance and inclusive development in Ghana and Uganda.

​He is also working on a project exploring the politics of securing higher levels of capacity and commitment to delivering improved quality schooling, through a comparison of Bangladesh and Ghana. Finally, he is providing support for a project on women’s political empowerment exploring the link between women’s political inclusion in developing countries and the successful adoption and implementation of policies aimed at gender equity.

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on (1) economic, political, and social change, with emphases on institutions and preferences, and (2) the economic and political history of the Middle East, with a focus on the role of Islam.

His current projects explore the role of traditional institutions in the Middle East on poor political performance, as measured by democratization and human liberties. Among his publications are Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press), Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press), and The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press), all translated into multiple languages.

​He is also the editor of the tri-lingual, ten-volume compilation, Socio-Economic Life in Seventeenth-century Istanbul: Glimpses from Court Records (İş Bank Publications).

After graduating from Robert Academy in Istanbul in 1973, Kuran went on to study economics at Princeton University (AB 1977) and Stanford University (PhD 1982). Between 1982 and 2007 he taught at the University of Southern California. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the John Olin Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and a visiting professor of economics at Stanford University.

He currently directs the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS); edits a book series for Cambridge University Press, Economics, Choice and Society; (as of January 2017) co-edits the Journal of Comparative Economics, and serves on numerous editorial boards.