Monday, August 26, 2013

PA and Sociology Students Among Archer Fellows

The UT Dallas Archer Fellows for Summer 2013 are heading back to Dallas after spending the summer months interning in Washington D. C. The Archer Center was established by the UT System in conjunction with Former U.S. Representative Bill Archer as a way to bring highly motivated and accomplished students to Washington, D.C. to participate in varied internships and take part in classes focusing on policy, economics, and politics.

Before leaving our nation's capital, Archer Fellow from UT Dallas' PA and Sociology program joined Dr. Don Arbuckle in the Vice President Ceremonial Office, where they posed for a picture while doing the UT Dallas Swoosh.

Esmerelda Sachez, Applied Sociology; Donald Arbuckle, PA; Laura Gorecki, PA; and Evan Carr, PA.  

The VP's Ceremonial Office is a beautifully restored room which Teddy Roosevelt inhabited  he was Secretary of the Navy. The desk pictured is the one used by Richard Nixon in his hideaway office (in a different part of the building) during Watergate.  In the top of it is a hole that housed the cord of the tape recorder that got him in so much trouble. The center drawer of the desk is autographed by every Vice President since Truman.  

We congratulate all three of our Archer Fellows and look forward to having them back on campus.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

PA/Sociology Program Welcomes New Faculty Members

Please join us in welcoming three new faculty members to our program this fall. And be sure to check this blog in the coming days as we feature each one of them in articles designed to help you get to know them better.

Evgenia Gorina, an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, joins us from Arizona State University. She studies public finance and budgeting and is particularly interested in tax policy, fiscal rules, and institutions. Evgenia’s dissertation explores dimensions of local government fiscal sustainability, focusing on pension liability funding, debt burdens, and budgetary balance. Her recent coauthored paper in Public Budgeting and Finance examines effects of tax and expenditure limitations and the form of government on local finance. Evgenia’s secondary focus, shaped by her past work at the Center for Population Dynamics at Arizona State, includes internal and international migration. 






James Harrington, an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, joins us from the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. He primarily studies issues related to performance management, performance data usage, policy evaluation, and education governance. His research has appeared in journals such as American Politics Research and American Journal of Education. Professor Harrington is currently working on several projects examining the dynamics of performance data usage in public agencies.




Nicholas Vargas is a new Assistant Professor of Sociology. His research focuses on status distinctions that operate as bases of social inequality and social inclusion/exclusion comprising race and ethnicity, immigration status, and religion. He is currently researching issues related to racial contestation, the experience whereby one’s personal racial identity does not match how they are perceived racially by others. Vargas’ peer-reviewed research has appeared in journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, Sociological Perspectives, and Sociology of Religion, among others. His research on religion and non-religion in the United States has received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association including the religion section’s “Most Distinguished Article” award with colleague Matthew Loveland. 

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Fall 2013 PA Events: Save the Date

Plan to attend the following Public Affairs events coming up in Fall 2013. Be sure to check back for more details.

 • September 3 - Graduate student meet and greet reception. Time and date to be announced.

 • September 27 - Brown Bag Series presentation by Jessica Sowa associate professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado – Denver.

 • November 8 - Brown Bag Series presentation by Chao Guo, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management in the Penn School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.