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As the new school year begins, first-year students aren’t the only new faces in the classroom. SIS welcomed two new faculty members for this academic year: Hansong Li and Sarah Khan. Khan received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 2020, and before joining SIS, she was an Assistant Professor at Yale University from 2020 to 2024. She will be joining the Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics. To get to know her better, we asked Khan about her research areas, fellowships, and the courses she’ll be teaching.Ìý

What are your main research areas?

My research is focused on topics of gender and politics in South Asia. I study the causes and consequences of gender gaps in political preferences, preference expression, political participation, and representation. Some of my work involves collaboration with civil society and government to evaluate the effectiveness of policy interventions designed to close these gender gaps and address gender inequities using field experiments.

For example, in an ongoing project with collaborators, I am exploring whether group-based trainings designed to address psychosocial barriers foster women’s political engagement in Pakistan. I am also interested in the role of researcher positionality in field experimental research, and how to integrate qualitative methods and approaches into field experiments.

You are an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Center (MHRC), both of which are in Pakistan. Can you share a bit about your involvement with these organizations and your experience as an international fellow?

Most of my field research is based in Pakistan, and I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to be affiliated with these institutes dedicated to policy-relevant research on governance and political economy issues in Pakistan. My affiliation has facilitated pursuing co-authorship and collaborative projects with Pakistani researchers based at these institutes, working with promising young students at these institutions who have served as research assistants on projects, and some of whom have then gone on to pursue PhDs in political science and economics. It has also been very helpful for establishing partnerships with civil society organizations in Pakistan and disseminating research findings to policy stakeholders there.

I also serve as an organizing committee member for the annual Pathways to Development Conference, co-organized by IDEAS and MHRC (along with other partners) which is an excellent venue to engage with cutting-edge research on various development issues concerning Pakistan from across disciplines. In collaboration with these institutes, I have also organized the Empirical Research on Gender (EGEN) workshop for junior economics and political science researchers in Pakistan working on gender and political topics to receive feedback and mentorship on their work.

What classes are you teaching at SIS this year? Why are these topics important for SIS students to study?

In Fall 2024, I will be teaching SIS 802, which is the course introducing our PhD students to foundational topics and debates in comparative politics and helping them prepare for their comprehensive exam. We cover a broad range of topics from the study of political institutions and regimes, political economy, groups and identities, ideology and culture, and collective action, to electoral behavior and contentious politics.

While we can’t explore any one topic in-depth, the broad overview is intended to help students identify where their research interests lie and situate them within key debates and research agendas in the discipline. Taking the equivalent of this course during my PhD is what drew me to comparative politics and helped me find my place as a scholar, and I am really hoping to pass on that experience to my students this semester.

What are you looking forward to most about joining the SIS community?

The SIS community is so unique in how it brings together scholars from across disciplines who share a core commitment to work that is policy-relevant, and actively engaged with normative concerns of development, well-being, and justice. I also love how international and diverse it is and what that means for the different perspectives represented in the work produced here. I am excited to learn more about the research my colleagues across disciplines are doing, especially on topics in the politics of development, and in South Asia.

I anticipate that being in this environment and getting feedback on my work from them will shape the direction of my own future research, and I look forward to that growth for myself. I am also really looking forward to engaging and working with SIS students, especially the incoming students who are starting their SIS journey at the same time as me.