David Waldner, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Virginia will give a public lecture, “Late to the Party: Middle East Party Systems from the Interwar Period to the Post-Arab Spring.” This talk is cosponsored with the Department of Politics Qualitative Research Colloquium and held in Corwin room 127.

Professor Waldner is the author of State Building and Late Development (Cornell University Press, 1999) and “Policy History: Regimes,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Elsevier Science Ltd., 2001).

From his bio page: “My teaching and research begin with investigation into the causes of different forms of state formation and the consequences of variations in state-building trajectories for economic development and democratization. Although I began my professional career as a specialist in Middle East politics, my current work includes material from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well. My empirical work raises questions about theory and method, questions that I explore in courses and papers about theories of comparative politics, qualitative methods, and the philosophy of science. My two current book projects are Democracy and Dictatorship in the Post-Colonial World and The Philosophy of Social Science Methods. Recent papers include “Anti Anti-Determinism,” “On the Non-Institutional Origins of the Institutional Origins of Capitalism,” and “Inferences and Explanations at the K/T Boundary… and Beyond.”