Book Launch for "Persistent Citizens: Pursuing Social Welfare Benefits in Brazil and Argentina"

The event will be held in Coble Hall 306 at 3:00 PM on November 2nd. 

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro (Brown University) will present the book, and Professors Flavia Andrade (UIUC) and Tara Grillos (Purdue University) will briefly present their comments on the book afterwards, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. Her research explores the politics of accountability and the quality of representation and democracy in lower and middle income countries, with a particular focus on Latin America. Her first book, Curbing Clientelism in Argentina: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy, was published with Cambridge University Press (2014) and received the Donna Lee Van Cott Award from the Political Institutions Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, Studies in Comparative International Development, and elsewhere. She received her PhD from Columbia University.

Matthew S. Winters is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and Leslie A. Watt Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Winters studies how citizens engage with their governments, how voters react to political corruption, and how citizens in both aid-receiving and aid-giving countries think about international development assistance. He has undertaken extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and has conducted research in Bangladesh, Brazil, Malawi, Mali, and Uganda. During the 2023–24 academic year, Winters was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in residence at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In the fall of 2016, he was a Hitachi / Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in Japan. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.

Flavia Andrade is Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also holds appointments in the Sociology Department. In her research, Andrade examines how demographic, socioeconomic, and epidemiological transitions shape health across the life course, with a particular emphasis on Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino populations in the U.S. Her research portfolio spans multiple health outcomes, including disability, cognition, chronic conditions, mental health, oral health, and life expectancy. More recently, her work has expanded to investigate unmet healthcare needs and the intersection of biological and social factors in cognitive aging. She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Tara Grillos is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and co-director of the JMK Experimental Social Science Research Lab. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Forestry & Natural Resources. Grillos is a political economist and environmental social scientist. Her research focuses on questions of participation, deliberation, collective action, and public goods provision, particularly with respect to natural resource dilemmas in developing countries. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and published in policy-oriented peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, Ecological Economics, World Development, and Conservation Letters, as well as top political science outlets, such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Public Administration Review. Grillos received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science.