During the academic year 2021–22, the Hoover Institution announced the appointment of four outstanding scholars for the Hoover Fellows program, now in its third year.
The fellows, all doctoral recipients in the early stages of their academic profession, have the unique opportunity to develop a career path at Hoover, conduct innovative research, and contribute to the intellectual life of the Institution and the greater Stanford community. At the end of each scholar’s five-year term, their fellowship can be renewed for an additional five years. After ten years in the program, Hoover Fellows are eligible to join the ranks of the senior fellowship.
Below are biographies of the new Hoover Fellows:
Brett Carter is a Hoover Fellow and an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relationsat the University of Southern California. He received a PhD in political science from Harvard University and has previously held fellowships at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Carter’s research focuses on politics in the world’s autocracies. His first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), marshals a range of empirical evidence to probe the politics of autocratic propaganda. His second book project, Autocracy in Post–Cold War Africa, will explore how Central Africa’s autocrats maintain their despotism despite the existing democratic institutions in their respective countries and the international pressure that occasionally makes repression of their citizens costly. His work has appeared in, among other platforms, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and Journal of Democracy, and has been featured in the New York Times and on NPR’s Radiolab.
Erin Baggott Carter is a Hoover Fellow and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. She is also a non-resident scholar at the University of California–San Diego 21st Century China Center. For the 2020–21 academic year, she is a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She received a PhD in government from Harvard University and was previously a fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Carter’s research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. She recently completed a book on autocratic propaganda (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) based on an original dataset of eight million articles in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly seventy countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Brookings Institution, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
Matthew Lowenstein is a Hoover Fellow focusing on the economic history of modern China from the late imperial period to the early People’s Republic. His dissertation, which he is currently turning into a book, is a study of northern China’s indigenous financial system from the late Qing to the early Republican period (ca. 1820–1911). Lowenstein’s other research interests include the history of traditional Chinese accounting, the political economy of “warlordism,” and the history of central economic planning. Lowenstein received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Lowenstein previously worked as a securities analyst in Beijing and New York covering the Chinese financial sector. His nonacademic works have appeared in The Diplomat and Foreign Policy.
Brian Wheaton is a Hoover Fellow focusing on political economy, cultural economics, and macroeconomics. His work on political economy and cultural economics focuses on the important role culture plays in shaping material economic and political outcomes. His study of macroeconomics examines how various forms of government intervention and regulation shape the macroeconomy. Wheaton’s most recent focus has been on the effects that legislation has on beliefs held by the general public. Some of Wheaton’s other projects explore the effects of school corporal punishment on long-run cultural and economic outcomes, the role of motivated reasoning in political polarization and how it can be minimized, the macroeconomic effects of Eastern European flat-tax reforms, and the implications of the minimum wage for monetary policy efficacy. Wheaton received his AA from College of Marin, his BA from University of California–Berkeley, and his MA and PhD from Harvard University.
The Hoover Fellows program was announced during the academic year 2019–20. In addition to the cohort introduced this year, Hoover Fellows include Valentin Bolotnyy, who looks at how empirical microeconomic tools can solve pressing social problems; Tyler Goodspeed, an economist, who previously served as acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Cole Bunzel, a historian and Arabist who studies the contemporary affairs of the Middle East; and Jacquelyn Schneider, who focuses on the intersections of technology, national security, and political psychology.
For more information on the Hoover Fellow program, click here.
