Chair's Welcome
Welcome to the Department, and our new website!
In many ways, we are not a typical Political Science department. We're a comprehensive department at a Research I public university, yet our approach to studying and teaching politics features work at the intersections of the traditional subdisciplines, and we particularly welcome problem- and issue-driven research. The work of our distinguished and diverse faculty is eclectic and rigorous, methodologically innovative, grounded in theory, global in reach, and engages some of the big questions in politics. Over the past several years we have hired 14 new faculty through a unique Faculty Hiring Initiative; their work cuts across subfields and involves Middle East politics, education politics and policy, international human rights, comparative democratization, language and politics, digital citizenship, and many others. They've infused the department with energy and have expanded our course offerings considerably.
What does this mean for you? If you’re an undergraduate student, it means our curriculum starts with a focus on political issues and problems and offers you perspectives and theories that help make sense of a complex political world. In addition to traditional introductory courses in Comparative Politics, American Politics, World Politics, etc., we teach courses called “What is Politics?”, "The Politics of Food", "Race and Politics", “Controversies in Public Policy”, “Power and Participation”, “Politics Now”, "Democracy and Justice", and others that reach across disciplines. We aim to teach you skills, content, and approaches to understanding politics rather than strictly political science per se. And while many of our introductory courses are large, we’ve capped our upper-level courses at 25 students so that all our majors enjoy many small, discussion-based classes. You'll enjoy small class sizes with all the benefits of studying in a large research university. This approach also provides excellent preparation for many types of graduate schools, and our students go on to graduate school at the most pretigious universities in the country and world. You could encapsulate our teaching approach by noting that we teach politics to undergraduates and political science to graduate students.
Our graduate program is strong in all the major subfields, yet what sets us apart is our cross-subdisciplinary approach to political science. Our workshops and speakers series focus on broad themes, such as Ambiguities of Democracy or Governance and Institutions, that draw faculty and graduate students from all subfields. You’ll hear political theorists commenting on the work of a comparativist, American politics scholars engaging with international relations specialists, scholars of public policy and law probing across subfields from their unique perspectives. We believe that political science is enriched by diverse perspectives from within the discipline as well as those from outside, which is why we’ve also launched an interdisciplinary speakers series. If as a graduate student you want to study mainly in your subfield you can do that, but you’ll miss out on the rich intellectual life of the department and a Carnegie Research I university. And, frankly, if you want to study formal modeling or mathematical game theory, you’ll probably be better served elsewhere. But if you want to study in a department where we value important political questions and believe the study of politics is too important to be left to single sub-fields and even single disciplines, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better place.
We do all of this in the beautiful, sometimes quirky, and rural yet culturally-rich place called the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. The Five-College area (which includes Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, in addition to the University) provides abundant intellectual opportunities, and when you crave city life Boston is under two hours and New York City about 3½ hours away to which there's frequent bus/train service if you don't want to drive.
Take a look around our website and, better yet, visit us in Amherst. You’ll find a distinctive department and an exciting intellectual environment.
John
