Students are required to secure a primary advisor by the beginning of the spring semester junior year. The advisor must be a faculty member who will be in residence at Brown throughout the student's senior year. You should be proactive in the search for your advisor – identify faculty members who might be interested in your thesis topic and approach them. The more interested they are in your project and the earlier you approach them, the more likely you are to benefit from their mentoring. The DS Concentration Advisor, Advisory Committee, and DEVL 1500 and DEVL 1980 instructors are available to help students identify potential advisors.
It is important to view the thesis as a 3-semester undertaking as you are expected to work alongside your advisor and DEVL 1500 instructor to define a viable research topic and appropriate research method before undertaking research during the summer of your junior year.
Students are also expected to engage along with their supervisor in meeting the outputs for the DEVL 1980 class.
There are at least three possible foundations on which a good working relationship may be built:
1. A faculty member you find interesting and stimulating, and someone who will engage your work and your ideas.
2. A faculty member who either has expertise in the area you are investigating (knowledge of the issue or region) or is conducting similar research.
3. A faculty member who has theoretical or methodological interests and expertise in areas that will be useful to your research topic. Such a person might actually know very little about the specific topic you are researching (e.g., access to agricultural land in Bihar, India) but may know a lot about a body of theory (gender and household dynamics) that is essential to your ability to develop the appropriate analytical framework for your research, or may have skills in a technique (statistics, ethnography) that will help you develop the appropriate investigative tools.
By early in your Senior year, you should also have secured a second reader. The second reader can be a visiting fellow or post-doc, so long as they are here for the full academic year.
If a senior capstone project requires the use of quantitative methods, by the end of the junior year students should take at least one course in statistics for social science in any of the following departments: economics, political science, sociology.
Geri Augusto – Visiting Assoc. Professor Mark Blyth – Professor Robert Blair – Assistant Professor Lundy Braun – Professor Christopher Bull – Senior Lecturer Kenneth Chay – Professor Edward Feller – Clinical Professor Scott Frickel – Professor Andrew Foster – Professor Lina Fruzetti – Professor Matthew Guttmann – Professor Abigail Harrison – Assistant Professor Paget Henry – Professor Elizabeth Hoover - Assistant Professor José Itzigsohn – Professor Margot Jackson – Professor Nancy Jacobs – Associate Professor Jennifer Johnson – Assistant Professor |
Rachael Kantrowitz – Visiting Scholar Michael Kennedy – Professor Dawn King – Lecturer Robert Lee – Associate Professor Adam Levine – Professor Dore Levy – Professor Patsy Lewis – Visiting Professor Richard Locke – Professor, Provost Mark Lurie – Associate Professor Daniel Rodriguez – Assistant Professor Andrew Schrank – Professor Elena Shih – Assistant Professor Bhrigu Singh – Assistant Professor Daniel Smith – Professor Melten Toksöz – Visiting Assoc Professor Hanan Toukan – Visiting Asst Professor Leah Vanwey- Professor Ashutosh Varshney – Professor Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro – Assistant Professor Michael White – Professor Vazira Zamindar – Associate Professor |