Jacob Kaplan, a criminal justice professional specialist, has been awarded a $260,00 grant from Arnold Ventures to build dedicated data infrastructure for FBI crime data. The project will focus on systematically improving the quality and usability of the dataset so that common, solvable issues are addressed once rather than requiring individual researchers to solve them repeatedly.
By creating standardized infrastructure for one of the nation’s most widely used crime datasets, the project aims to strengthen the reliability of evidence used to inform research and public policy.
“FBI crime data is one of the most widely used public datasets in crime research, but it has serious data quality issues that make it hard to use correctly,” Kaplan said. “This grant gives us the resources to fix that by building infrastructure to clean, validate, and document the data in a systematic way. The goal is to make it easier for researchers and policymakers to use this data without having to worry about whether they're doing so correctly.”
Elliot Mamet, a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer, received honorable mention for the David Brian Robertson Best Paper Award from the politics and history section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The award recognizes the best paper in Politics and History presented at the previous APSA annual meeting.
Mamet’s paper is titled “Procedural Power as Democratic Voice: The Fight for Nonvoting Members to Vote in Committee of the Whole,” and is co-authored with Austin Bussing, assistant professor of political science at Trinity University. The paper examines how nonvoting members of Congress representing Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories expanded their procedural authority in the House of Representatives during the 1990s, offering new perspectives on congressional reform, democratic representation, and racial justice.
“We are delighted to receive this recognition for our research on the nonvoting members of Congress from Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories,” Mamet said. “Our work chronicles how the nonvoting members used creativity and entrepreneurship to vastly expand their procedural powers on the House floor in the 1990s. Their efforts offer a template for changing Congressional rules to better accord with ideas of democratic equality and racial justice. We are very grateful to the APSA Politics and History Section for considering our work.”
Julian Zelizer, the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, will spend the upcoming academic year as a Scholar in Residence at the Brennan Center for Justice while on sabbatical. During his residency, Zelizer will begin work on a new book for Harper Collins, “Rendezvous with Democracy: America, 1945–1974”.
A leading historian of American politics, Zelizer’s scholarship examines the evolution of democracy, political institutions, and public leadership in the United States. His forthcoming book explores how Americans sought to redefine democracy in the decades following World War II, as the nation grappled with civil rights, political reform, and the legacy of defeating fascism abroad.
“I am excited to be a Scholar in Residence at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, which has become one of the premier institutions studying gerrymandering, voting rights, the balance of power, and many of the core issues that have animated my scholarship on the history of American politics,” Zelizer said. “I will spend my year at the center starting work on a new book about the history of the United States between World War II and the early 1970s, with a focus on the story of how Americans struggled to define what democracy would look like after having defeated fascism overseas. I look forward to spending time with the spectacular group of scholars who are part of the institution.”