Friday, November 8, 2019
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Harvard University
Rachel Brulé is an Assistant Professor of Political Science of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is a tenure-track faculty member of the Social Science Division. She is also a member of the Empirical Gender Research Network (E-GEN) and a Research Affiliate with NYU’s Global TIES for Children. She specializes in comparative politics with a substantive focus on gender, South Asia, political economy, and institutions. Her research combines careful causal identification with innovative theory building to understand why equity-promoting reforms have unintended consequences that may deepen inequality.
A series of forthcoming publications captures the impact of reforms expanding rights to a crucial good – land – in the world’s largest democracy: India. Her articles have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Politics and the Journal of Development Economics, and her first book manuscript, titled Women’s Representation and Resistance: Positive and Perverse Consequences of Indian Reforms for Gender Equality, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. In her book, she finds a paradoxical outcome of quotas improving women’s political voice: while representation ensures enforcement of women’s new economic rights, it also mobilizes backlash against them. A recent news article about her research can be found here.