About the Director
Kenneth M. Roberts is the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences and Professor of Government. His term as director is January 2009 to December 2011.
Prof. Roberts received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992 and taught at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty at Cornell. He has been a visiting research associate at FLACSO-Chile and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame University. His teaching and research interests are in comparative and Latin American politics, with an emphasis on the political economy of development, political representation, and the politics of social inequality. He is the author of Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford University Press, 1998), along with a forthcoming manuscript from Cambridge University Press on market reform and party system transformation in contemporary Latin America. He is also the co-editor of Beyond Neoliberalism: Patterns, Responses, and New Directions in Latin America and the Caribbean, forthcoming from Palgrave-MacMillan. His research on political parties, populism, and labor and social movements has been published in a number of scholarly journals, including American Political Science Review, World Politics, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Politics and Society, and Latin American Politics and Society.
Professor Roberts has conducted research in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina, with funding support from Fulbright, MacArthur, Mellon, and National Science Foundation grants. He is also a co-team leader of the Institute for the Social Sciences 2006-09 interdisciplinary theme project on “Contentious Knowledge: Science, Social Science, and Social Movements,” which explores the role of scientific expertise in the making of public policies and the political conflict that often surrounds it. Currently, Professor Roberts is coordinating a working group of U.S. and Latin American scholars studying the “new Left” in Latin America. He serves on the editorial boards of Latin American Research Review and Latin American Politics and Society.
Ken Roberts leads Institute for the Social Sciences
