Announcing Michael Albertus as Deputy Dean and Jon Rogowski as Associate Faculty Director

Dean Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology, has announced two faculty leadership appointments. Michael Albertus, Professor in the Department of Political Science, has accepted the role of Deputy Dean for the Division. Jon Rogowski, Professor in the Department of Political Science, has accepted the role of Associate Faculty Director for SSD’s MA programs.

As Deputy Dean, Albertus will help to oversee the division’s processes for academic appointments, with a focus on instructional faculty, post docs, visitors, and others—and identify further ways in which the Division can support instructional faculty and other academic appointees.

His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. His most recent book, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines why governments that implement land reform programs only rarely grant property rights to land beneficiaries and how that impacts development and inclusion. He joined the University of Chicago in 2012 as an assistant professor and has previously served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2018-19) and as director of the Committee on International Relations (2020-21).

Albertus joins Leslie Kay, Robert Vargas, Mark Hansen, and Howard Nusbaum as a deputy dean in the Division. Kay provides oversight for the review of and strategic planning for the Division's research infrastructure, broadly construed, and has input into broader divisional projects and policies. Vargas’ portfolio focuses on graduate education, and he works with students, departments, the dean of students' team, and broader partners across campus to strengthen and sustain graduate programs in SSD. Hansen continues his role as Executive Director of MA Programs in the Social Sciences and faculty director of the MAPSS Program. Nusbaum is Master for the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.

As Associate Faculty Director, Rogowski will work with Mark Hansen on oversight of all of the Division's MA programs as well as co-directing, with Hansen, the MAPSS program.

His research interests are in American politics, where he studies representation and accountability, political institutions, and American political history. He has written two books on the American presidency and published articles in journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. His current research projects study the growth of bureaucratic institutions and the use of presidential power in the contemporary and historical periods. He is a 2007 MAPSS alum and earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2012. Prior to returning to UChicago in 2021, he was on the faculty at Harvard University as well as Washington University in St. Louis.