Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 2003-2004

Arianne Chernock, History (renewal): "Intellect Admits of No Sexual Distinction": Men in British Feminism, 1789-1832. In this dissertation, Ms. Chernock argues that men played a key role in the elaboration of feminist ideas in Great Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far from being an ideology fostered almost exclusively by a small group of women, as is often suggested, feminism -- at least in its nascent stages -- was actively promoted by members of both sexes representing a host of backgrounds and perspectives.  Men like John Anderson (a natural philosopher), Alexander Jardine (a lieutenant-colonel), Benjamin Heath Malkin (a professor of history), William Shepherd (a Unitarian minister), and William Thompson (a political economist), together with women like Mary Wollstonecraft, drew on a blend of Jacobinism, liberalism, and religious Dissent to make a strong case for the reformulation of women's traditional position in Great Britain. This dissertation will highlight these men's important and until now largely overlooked contributions, which included establishing a coeducational university and lobbying for birth control, with the larger goal of demonstrating that early feminist thought was not only more diverse, but also more integral to a range of British religious, political, and cultural movements than has previously been acknowledged.

Mark Vail, Political Science: Renegotiating the Social Contract: The Dilemmas of Contemporary French and German Social-Protection Reform. This dissertation investigates transformations in the French and German political economies since World War II, suggesting that the degree of policy change that has taken place in these two systems forces one to rethink conventional portraits of "frozen" European welfare states. A rich literature points to relatively stable levels of social spending in continental European welfare states such as those of France and Germany as evidence of their inability to adjust to shifting economic challenges. These studies' focus on social spending, however, neglects other critical policy areas that define systems of welfare capitalism, including, but not limited to, labor-market and macro-economic policy. Mr. Vail suggests that capturing the character of changes in French and German welfare capitalism requires attention not only to the welfare state but also to a broad range of social and economic policies that define the mechanisms through which wealth is produced and distributed. Focusing on institutional and policy developments during three periods -- the post-war "golden age" of capitalism, the processes of marketization in the 1980s and the early 1990s, and the current period of social-policy reform -- this dissertation contends that the French and German systems of welfare capitalism have actually undergone profound changes during the past 60 years. In detailing these changes and exploring the complex connections among them, the dissertation aims not merely to contribute to the literature on welfare reform, but also to suggest a fundamentally different approach to understanding the complex relationships between the welfare state and the broader political economy in advanced industrial democracies.