Obama Panel Speaker Bios

Moderator: Dan Tichenor, Knight Professor of Political Science and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Policy, is a scholar of American political thought and history, and has published extensively on immigration, the American presidency, public policy, organized interests and social movements, and inequality in the U.S. He is currently completing a book, Presidential Prerogatives, on executive power, civil liberties and democracy in times of crisis.

Panelists:

Jane Cramer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, teaches American foreign policy and international security. Her research focuses on the causes of state over-estimations of threats to security, including the causes and success of the threat inflation before the Iraq War. She is a co-editor of a forthcoming volume, American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11 and is also working on testing hypotheses about why the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Dennis Galvan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Head of the International Studies Department. His research centers on the comparative analysis of development, the politics of cultural identity, political legitimation, and the search for locally meaningful and sustainable models of social change in the "third world." He is currently completing a book entitled Everyday Nation Building, and co-organized an international conference on HIV/AIDS in Africa that took place on the UO campus the first week of April.

Dan HoSang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Ethnic Studies. He is completing a book on California electoral initiatives entitled Racial Propositions: Genteel Apartheid in Postwar California and is engaged in a project that examines how selected community organizations in Oregon and Washington participate in electoral politics. He is organizing a symposium on "Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century," which will take place April 17-19 on the UO campus.

Joe Lowndes is an Assistant Professor of Political Science whose research interests include American political development, conservatism, discourse analysis, African- American politics, U.S. political culture and political identity. His book, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism, examines the role of race in shaping contemporary politics.