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Mitchell Center Postdoctoral Fellow Receives APSA Award

Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - 11:00am


Rafael Khachaturian, the 2018-19 Mitchell Center Postdoctoral Fellow, received the 2018 Stephen Eric Bronner Dissertation Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association for his dissertation, “Discipline, Knowledge, and Critique: Marxist Theory and the Revival of the State in American Political Science, 1968-1989." The dissertation explores the reemergence of scholarly interest in the study of the state, after its decline in usage during the previous decades. Arguing that this intellectual shift was a response to the multifaceted crises of Cold War-era liberalism, he traces how the growing interest in critical theories of the state provided scholars with a new standpoint from which to evaluate the relationship between the social sciences, liberal democracy, and the American state itself, with lasting effects on the discipline of American political science.