Adam Gomez

Adam Gomez earned his PhD from UC San Diego in 2010, and is the current Jack Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UW Madison's American Democracy Forum.  He has a wide range of research interests, including American political thought, political theology, contemporary democratic theory, and the social scientific study of religion.  His dissertation, The Nation Invisible: American Civil Religion and the American Political Tradition, 1838-1925, reflects these interests, arguing that civil religion is an influential aspect of American national identity that structures Americans' sense of the national telos and the liberties, obligations and prohibitions that are believed to derive from it.  He is currently revising his dissertation for publication as a book, and is also beginning a new project arguing that democratic political obligation should be conceived of as being grounded in gratitude rather than duty. His work has recently appeared in American Political Thought.

View his CV and other information on his personal web site: adamgomez.wordpress.com

Contact: agomez4@wisc.edu

Boriana Nikolova

Boriana Nikolova in getting her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and is currently a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at UW Madison. Her dissertation, "Poverty and Inequality after the Fall of Communism: From Economic Measures to Social Meanings and Perceptions" examines the historically based and sometimes counterintuitive meanings that poverty and inequality can assume in different countries and demonstrates the importance of these local meanings for understanding the effects of inequality and poverty. Her dissertation relies on in-depth interviews, media discourse, and popular culture sources to compare the popular perceptions of poverty and inequality in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.

View her CV here.