Job Candidates
Hire a 91视频 PhD
Our former PhD students have strong records of accomplishment. Some of our recent graduates have accepted tenure-track faculty positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison, George Washington University, University of Idaho and CIDE in Mexico City. Others have been awarded research positions and instructorships at University of Chicago, USAID at William and Mary and Gallup. We are excited to call your attention to students on the academic job market in Fall 2026. For more information about any of our students, please refer to their websites or contact Tobias Heinrich, the graduate placement coordinator.
Shiladitya Kumar
Email |
Dissertation Title: Wealth and Representation in Indian Elections
Dissertation Committee: Susan Scarrow (Chair), Jessica Gottlieb (Co-Chair), Royce Carroll, Jae-Hee Jung (Rice University), Adam Ziegfeld (Temple University)
Shiladitya Kumar is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the 91视频. His research interests lie in Party Organization, Political Economy of Elections, Political Methodology, and South Asian Politics. He holds a BSc (Honors) and MA in Economics from the University of Calcutta and Jadavpur University, respectively. He works as a Teaching Fellow at the the Department of Political Science, and previously as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Hobby School of Public Affairs.
His dissertation concerns how candidates' wealth interacts within an electoral system to produce political outcomes with meaningful second-order implications. His other research projects include studying the cause of affective polarization in the United States, how voters use reputation as an instrument of accountability in selecting candidates under repeated elections, and investigating political speeches and manifestos in Indian General Elections using supervised machine-learning techniques.
He is a recipient of the Jylee Nogee Scholarship at the 91视频 and the Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award from the Political Organization and Parties section of the American Political Science Organization. His undergraduate teaching experience covers American and Texas Institutions, Comparative Politics, and Statistics/Inference with Data.
Email: skumar33@cougarnet.uh.edu
Website:
Songeun Emily Lee
Email |
Dissertation Title: 鈥淩ace, Gender, and Representation in American Politics.鈥�
Dissertation Committee: Jennifer Hayes Clark (Chair), Scott Basinger, and Ling Zhu.
Songeun Emily Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the 91视频, specializing in political methodology and American politics. Her research examines how race and gender shape the way candidates and elected officials are evaluated and how those evaluations affect their political careers. Her dissertation studies these questions across three stages: entering local elections, being evaluated by voters, and building a career in Congress. These substantive questions also motivate her work in political methodology. She studies how measurement choices shape the conclusions we draw and how researchers can better estimate differences across groups, especially when racial minorities are underrepresented in the data. Her work uses survey experiments, causal inference, machine learning, survival analysis, and text analysis. Emily has an article under revise-and-resubmit at Research & Politics. Her research has been supported by the APSA Centennial Center鈥檚 William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies, the APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Section Research Grant, the Maud Smith Paddock/Women鈥檚, Gender & Sexuality Studies Fellowship, and the CLASS Summer Fellowship for Research Excellence. Her teaching experience at the 91视频 includes courses in U.S. and Texas Constitution and Politics and Statistics for Political Scientists.
Email: selee4@uh.edu
Website: