Our Team

Susan Stokes
Faculty Director
Dr. Stokes is the Faculty Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy, where she guides the strategy and direction of the center. She is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science, President of the American Political Science Association for the 2025-26 academic year, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts Sciences. Dr. Stokes has written or coauthored six books on topics including democratic theory, distributive politics and clientelism, political behavior and participation, democratic erosion, and Latin American politics. Dr. Stokes’s articles have appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and the Latin American Research Review. She teaches courses on political development, political parties and democracy, comparative political behavior, and distributive politics.

Kevin Kromash
Operations Director
Kevin is the Operations Director at the Chicago Center on Democracy, where he directs all aspects of the center’s operations, including strategy, research, fundraising, and communications. Kevin draws from experience in both the academic and corporate worlds to build the center into a world-class institution that helps resilient democratic institutions to thrive around the world.

Abby Feingold
Outreach and Events Coordinator
Abby is the Outreach and Events Coordinator at the Chicago Center on Democracy, where she manages the Center’s social media, plans events, and provides support for the Democracy Studies minor. Abby works on campus in Pick Hall for International Studies and is present at all events, so she is available to answer any questions about the Center. Abby has worked in programming for years, including at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. She uses her experience in conjunction with her history degree from the University to create relevant experiences that inspire conversation among UChicago students and the broader community.

Andrew Brandel
Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences
Andrew Brandel is an Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences. In addition to teaching the Democracy Core, he organizes sequence-wide student events. His primary research interests are in the politics of language, the role of literature in the making and maintaining of social worlds, and ordinary language philosophy’s contributions to theorizing democracy. His first book, Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (2023), examined Berlin’s rise as a world capital for cultural production, in times marked by resurgent ethno-nationalism, migrant “crisis,” and renewed threats to the freedom of expression. His next book, Anthropology and Its Literary Companions (under contract with University of Minnesota Press), looks at how literature has influenced anthropological thinking. He is the editor of several books and special issues on interdisciplinary approaches in the social sciences, a series co-editor for the Fordham University Press series Thinking from Elsewhere, Associate Editor of American Anthropologist, and an executive board member of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

Emily Grant
Research Assistant
Emily Grant is second-year student at the University of Chicago majoring in Economics and Philosophy. She is a research assistant on Professor Susan Stokes’s project examining government attacks on universities. In this role, she analyzes data on the causes and impacts of serious threats to academic freedom worldwide. Her work involves comparing universities before and after such threats, focusing on faculty, resources, and institutional conditions that contribute to backsliding. She is also a member of the Chicago Debate Society, teaches financial literacy to high school students in the Chicago area, and consults for a student-run organization on campus.

Alejandro Bonvecchi
Tinker Visiting Professor
Alejandro Bonvecchi will be a Tinker Visiting Professor at the Chicago Center on Democracy in Spring Quarter 2026. He is an Ordinary Professor of Political Science at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina), and an Independent Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). His work deals with decision-making by government elites, and has focused on fiscal federalism, legislative and presidential politics, the management of economic crises, and social policymaking. He has published five books, and his research has appeared, among others, in Comparative Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, and Latin American Politics and Society. His most recent book, Lawmaking under Authoritarianism, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Alejandro Poiré
Visiting Research Scholar
Alejandro Poiré is a Distinguished University Professor of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he has served as Vice President for Outreach and Engagement, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Government, and Dean of the School of Government and Public Transformation. During the 2025-2026 academic year, he is a visiting research scholar at the Chicago Center on Democracy.
In public service in Mexico, between 2006 and 2012, he held positions including Secretary of Governance, Deputy Secretary for Population, Migration, and Religious Affairs, and Head of the Unit for Political Development. He was also Executive Director of Prerogatives and Parties at Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute from 2003 to 2005.
He holds a master’s and doctorate in political science from Harvard University, a bachelor’s degree in political science from ITAM in Mexico, and has served as an expert and lecturer nationally and internationally on issues of democracy, security, and governance.

Limor Yehuda
June and Harold Patinkin Visiting Professor of Modern Israeli Studies, Department of Political Science
Dr. Yehuda is the June and Harold Patinkin Visiting Professor of Modern Israeli Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago during Autumn Quarter 2025. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in Jerusalem, where she is the Founding Chair of the Shemesh Center for the Study of a Partnership-Based Peace. A jurist by training, she studies conflicts and peace processes from comparative, theoretical, and multidisciplinary perspectives, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian case. Her book, Collective Equality: Human Rights and Democracy in Ethno-National Conflicts, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. She also teaches transitional justice, democracy, and multiculturalism at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law.

Simón Ballesteros
Postdoctoral Scholar
Simón is a postdoctoral scholar at the Chicago Center on Democracy. His research focuses on the relationship between democracy and political and legal institutions, with a regional emphasis in Latin America. At the Chicago Center on Democracy, he is part of the Global Governance, Trust, and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present project, as part of which is investigating Argentine responses to the International Monetary Fund in the early 2000s, as well as the contested legitimacies of regional international organizations in Latin America.

Paul Teas
Postdoctoral Scholar
Dr. Paul Teas is a postdoctoral scholar at the Chicago Center on Democracy, where he studies the relationship between political polarization and democratic backsliding in the United States. His research has been published in academic journals such as Nature and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, as well as in public opinion outlets including YouGov and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Eli Rau
External Research Affiliate

Radha Sarkar
External Research Affiliate
Radha Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tecnológico de Monterrey. Her research interests are inspired by contemporary developments in Latin American politics, and include questions of religion and politics, political violence, and direct democracy. At the Chicago Center on Democracy, she works on our research related to mechanisms of direct democracy.

Shahana Sheikh
External Research Affiliate
Shahana is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies political parties, political behavior, and party-voter linkages, with a regional focus on South Asia. Her research agenda is centered on how party strategy, campaigns, and political participation in developing democracies are shaped by significant transformations associated with development—especially, shifts in media and communication technology, urbanization, and environmental degradation. At the Chicago Center on Democracy, she works on our research related to mechanisms of direct democracy.