Faculty Research in Political Science & Geography

Stephen Amberg

Dr. Amberg has three projects in-progress in the fields of American political development and comparative political economy. One presents a study of the development of the Texas apparel industry to discuss the historical political conditions for a distinctive southern economic strategy. The second is a study of contemporary labor market policies of the American states, which casts doubt on the international distinction between liberal market economies and coordinated market economies and provides an alternative explanation for the diversity of U.S. policies. The third is a book that explains how the political status of American workers changes according to the innovation of and balance among three labor regulation regimes in United States.

Kathleen Arnold

Dr. Arnold has written on homelessness and immigration issues.  She has recently published a book "Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity" as well as articles on prerogative power and the welfare state.  She is currently working on a manuscript that connects a more global economy and neo-liberal policies to the strengthening of prerogative power. Separately, she is also analyzing racial and gendered discourse about immigrants in terms of their political status and economic treatment.

Thomas Bellows

Dr. Bellows has been the editor for the past three years of the American Journal of Chinese Studies.   This is an indexed international journal.  The focus is on Taiwan but numerous articles published on mainland China.  Some articles published on Chinese outside of Taiwan and China.  He is carrying out ongoing research on the evolution of the legislative process in the Republic of China on Taiwan.  External support for the research process ends in December 2003.  He is also the author for the second edition of the Singapore Historical Dictionary.

Jonathan Bernstein

Dr. Bernstein is currently involved in several projects related to contemporary political parties.  He is researching the Expanded Party in presidential politics, showing how personal politics and party factions interacted in the 2000 nomination campaigns.  He is investigating the effects of party networks in campaign organization on subsequent behavior in the U.S. House.  He is continuing the study of campaign finance and outsider advertising in Congressional elections, and is also comparing the effects of candidate friends and family with the effects of the Expanded Party in House campaigns.  Dr. Bernstein is also beginning a new project in which he argues that current theories of political parties -- especially rational choice theories -- fail to explain partisan behavior, and is proposing a new party theory to better explain the place of parties in the American political system.

James D. Calder

Dr. Calder's research projects are currently in two areas of interest: politics and policies associated with federal criminal justice; and development of a research institute model for security studies in the private and public sectors.  He is completing the final stages of research for a book manuscript on the politics of organized crime control and the Department of Justice Strike Force program, 1967-1989.  The book will be based on archival research from 7 presidential libraries, congressional research, and interviews with key decision makers and federal prosecutors.  A lengthy book chapter is in press that sets out a research institute design modeled after the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence.  He was recently re-elected to the Underwriters Laboratories (U.L.) Security Systems Council.

Miguel DeOliver

Dr. DeOliver's research centers upon racial and gender disparities in the postmodern urban landscape, including inequities in political power and educational access.  The  consumerization and commodification of San Antonio through the commercial imaging of its history is a special interest of his.  In addition, he has studied the political economy of U.S.-Mexican relations.

Francisco Durand

Dr. Durand’s current research focuses on four aspects of Peruvian politics: (1) the socio-political impact of economic globalization in the Peruvian business community and the new nature of business-goverment relations.  (2) Business social responsibility in Peru.  The case of tax-exempted donations and community projects in the 1990s.  (3) Business-Government relations in Peru under Fujimori's autocratic regime (1990-2000) and the changes that occurred in the two next democratic governments in 2000 and 2002.  (4) State institutional development in the Peruvian tax administration: success and failures to fight corruption (1991-2001).

Daniel Engster

Dr. Engster’s current research focuses on the nature of justice in a globalized and multicultural world.  He is presently writing two papers that he will deliver at conferences this spring: 1) “Globalization, Multiculturalism and Care” and 2) “Care Ethics and Natural Law.”  These papers constitute the first two chapters of a book tentatively entitled Globalism, Multiculturalism and Justice.  He has recently published a book on the development of the modern state entitled, Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power, and an article on Mary Wollstonecraft in the American Political Science Review. 

Richard Gambitta

Dr. Gambitta’s research focuses on public law and policy, and Texas politics. His research has appeared in the American Journal of Criminal Law, Law and Policy Quarterly, Rechtstheorie, the ARSP, and the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States.  He is completing several books under contract with McGraw-Hill, Inc. including Texas Democracy, The Lens of the Law, and San Antonio Politics, Economics and Society. 

Kathleen J. Hancock

Dr. Hancock’s research focuses on international relations theory, in particular concepts of international sovereignty.  She is currently completing a book and related articles.  The book, tentatively titled Surrendering Sovereignty:  Hierarchy in the International System and the Former Soviet Union, offers an innovative theory for understanding hierarchical relations between states, using Russia and other former Soviet states as her case studies. Her article “The Semi-Sovereign State:  Belarus and the Russian Neo-Empire” appears in the April 2006 edition of Foreign Policy Analysis.  She has also published book reviews in International Studies Review and Human Rights & Human Welfare.

Amy Jasperson

Dr. Jasperson’s research focuses on political  communication, the impact of political advertising tone on voters' attitudes, and the relationship between media coverage and advertising.  She has recently had an article accepted in the Journal of Advertising: "An Aggregate Examination of the Backlash Effect in Political Advertising:  The Case of the 1996 U.S. Senate Race in Minnesota."   She has also received conditional acceptance from the International Journal of Public Opinion for her article "It's Not Just the Economy Stupid!  The Influence of Press Coverage and Advertisements During a U.S. Senate Campaign."

Richard Jones

Dr. Jones teaches human social geography, economic geography, the geography of development, and spatial research methods.  His primary research area is international migration.  His edited book, Immigrants outside Megaloplis: Ethnic Transformation of the Heartland is under contract with Lexington Books, with contributions submitted by eleven immigration scholars from several disciplines (2007).  He produced two previous books, Ambivalent Journey: U.S. Migration and Economic Mobility in North-Central Mexico (1995); and Patterns of Undocumented Migration (1984).  Recent articles include “Immigrant Accommodation and Intra-ethnic Friction: the Case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in San Antonio,” in John Frazier and Eugene Tetty-Fio, editors, Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America. Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University Press, 2006;  “Cultural Diversity in a ‘Bi-cultural’ City: Factors in the Location of Ancestry Groups in San Antonio,” Journal of Cultural Geography, 2006; “Why Remittances Shouldn’t be Blamed for Rural Underdevelopment in Mexico: a Collective Response to Leigh Binford,” Critique in Anthropology, 2005 (co-authored with Jeffrey Cohen and Dennis Conway); and  “Multinational Investment and the Mobility Transition in Mexico and Ireland,” Latin American Politics and Society 2005. His articles on these themes have appeared in The Annals of the AAG, The Professional Geographer, Economic Geography, The Geographical Review, The Social Science Quarterly, The Journal of Borderlands Studies, Growth and Change, and others.

 Melvin Laracey

Dr. Laracey’s current research interests concern how non-judicial actors, ranging from the people as a whole to elite political actors, decide what the Constitution means.  Within this broad field of inquiry, he is focusing on the evolution of popular attitudes toward the appropriate role of the President in the national public policymaking process. He is the author of Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, published in 2002 by Texas A&M University Press.  The book is the first comprehensive study of the evolution of presidential approaches toward communicating with the public on policy matters, and of the constitutionally-based conceptions of the Presidency that shaped attitudes toward this practice. 

 John Morris

Dr. Morris is engaged in four book projects: (1) He is finishing an edited and updated English-Spanish bilingual 2002 edition of Pedro de Castaneda's circa 1562 "Narrative of the Coronado Expedition"; (2) He is working toward submission of 2-volume, illustrated study of Texas Photographers, "Lost Artists of the Texas Real Photo," at last turn of century (1900s); (3) He has been solicited by the University of New Mexico Press for book on "Texas Panhandle," which is in the concept stage only; (4) He has written a draft of a work on the historical geography of the "West Campus" neighborhood in Austin.  He is also completing two book chapters for inclusion in edited volumes: (1) "First Arrivals: Coronado, Hank Smith, and the Old Springs of the Llano Estacado," for the University of New Mexico Press; (2) "Family Farmers" for a Southern Methodist University Press book on the Southern High Plains.

Feng Qi

Current research by Dr. Qi focuses on geographic knowledge discovery (data mining) and knowledge-based natural resource modeling. The involvement of high tech tools such as GIS and Remote Sensing in the last two decades has brought unabated growth of geographical data in hundreds and thousands of gigabytes. This information explosion in geography calls for the application of intelligent data mining algorithms. With the distinct power of discovering previously unclear knowledge in spatial data, spatial data mining not only improves our spatial data analysis abilities, knowledge discovery from previously underutilized data sources (e.g. image data, map data, etc.) also provides an alternative to knowledge construction for knowledge-based systems where traditional knowledge acquisition is difficult. Dr. Qi's research interests lie in knowledge discovery from spatial databases for the purpose of knowledge-based environmental modeling.

David Romero

Dr. Romero studies American Electoral Behavior. Among other outlets, his work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. His current interests involve competition in primary elections.

Rodolfo Rosales

Dr. Rosales’ current research includes the following. He has an advanced contract with the University of Texas Press to write the political biography of Albert Peña, Jr., a political activist in South Texas. The biography,  Albert Peña, Jr.: The Story of an activist and his Community, and will be submitted by May of 2005.  He is also co-authoring with Linda Lopez, American Political Science Association, and Anna Christina Sampaio, University of Colorado at Denver, a Chicana and Chicano Politics text book, Understanding Chicana/o Politics: Contexts, Connections, and Contemporary Issues, for Polity Press of London and is expected to be submitted for publication by fall of 2005.

He is also co-editing with Sharon A. Navarro, UTSA, Latino Urban Agency, a volume on the politics of Latinos in six major U.S. cities. The objective in this project is to address the political diversity in the Latino community that emerges out of the differing historical and economic conditions from city to city.  His final project, which is tentatively entitled The Many Faces of Citizenship is a study of citizenship from a transnational perspective. The Many Faces of Citizenship, for which he has begun preliminary research, addresses the legacy of the western concept of citizenship as we engage in a political economy that does not recognize borders.

Boyka Stefanova

Dr. Stefanova’s research focuses on the European Union, European transitions to democracy, and international security.  She is currently working on a book project exploring European integration as a system of conflict resolution and articles on the security relations of the European Union and Balkan politics.  In addition, she is co-editor to a book proposal on the international responses to the war on terror and US foreign policy since 9/11.  Other research interests include the politics and ethics of international investment and comparative regionalism.

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