The plenary speakers for the 2021 ASEN Conference are Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Jasbir K. Puar, and Bart Bonikowski. We are also holding a roundtable on nationalism and crisis from regional perspectives, with Lenka BuštĂková, Judith Byfield, Dan Slater, and Miguel Centeno. Click on the speakers’ names to jump to their biographies on this page.
🙜 Cynthia Miller-Idriss 🙞
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is an award-winning author and scholar of extremism and youth radicalization. She directs the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) in the Center for University Excellence (CUE) at the American University in Washington, DC, where she is also Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education. Dr. Miller-Idriss is also Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the U.K.-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and serves on the international advisory board of the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) in Oslo, Norway. She has testified before the U.S. Congress and has briefed the UN Security Council’s Counter Terrorism Committee on white supremacist extremism and white nationalist terrorism, and frequently serves as a keynote speaker and expert panelist on trends in white supremacist extremism to global academic and policy communities as well as staff and representatives in U.S. and international government agencies and embassies.
A globally-recognized expert on far right youth, Dr. Miller-Idriss is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books, including Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in fall 2020. In addition to her academic work, Miller-Idriss writes frequently for mainstream audiences, with recent by-lines in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, CNN, The Hill, The Guardian, Le Monde, Salon, and more. She appears regularly in the media as an expert source and political commentator, most recently on Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, NBC’s Evening News with Lester Holt, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NBC’s The Today Show, the UK’s BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed, France 24’s The Interview, Ireland’s The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk and in Austria’s DATUM Magazin. Dr. Miller-Idriss frequently advises or consults with foundations and organizations seeking expertise on radicalization and extremism, and has provided expert consultation in legal cases involving radicalization and extremist violence.
Visit Cynthia Miller-Idriss’s website.
🙜 Jasbir K. Puar 🙞
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) published with Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she co-edits with Mel Chen.  Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (December 2017).
Puar’s edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ (“Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization”) and co-edited volumes of Society and Space (“Sexuality and Space”), Social Text (“Interspecies”), and Women’s Studies Quarterly (“Viral”).  She also writes for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Art India, The Feminist Review, Bully Bloggers, Jadaliyya, and Oh! Industry. Her writings have been translated into Polish, French, German, Croatian, Swedish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Danish.
Visit Jasbir K. Puar’s website.
🙜 Bart Bonikowski 🙞
Bart Bonikowski an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. His work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of political processes. In particular, my research agenda focuses on two topics: national identification and populist claims-making, with the former consisting of bottom-up understandings prevalent among national populations and the latter emphasizing top-down mobilization efforts by political elites. Given the centrality of both phenomena to radical-right politics, I have also been developing a larger project that seeks to explain the causes and potential consequences of the rise of radical politics in the United States and Europe (culminating in a book-in-progress titled Radicalized: How the Right Has Mobilized Nationalism and Undermined Liberal Democracy, under advance contract with Princeton University Press). My empirical research on these topics makes use of innovative data, from survey experiments to large corpora of political speeches and social media traces, and emphasizes relational approaches to the measurement of meaning, such as latent class analysis, word embeddings, and network analysis. As a result, I have a strong interest in the opportunities offered to social science by the proliferation of large-scale digital data
Visit Bart Bonikowski’s website.
🙜 Lenka BuštĂková 🙞
Lenka BuštĂková is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University;hHer research focuses on party politics, voting behavior, clientelism, and state capacity, with special reference to Eastern Europe.
Her book, Extreme Reactions: Radical Right Mobilization in Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press), demonstrates that far right parties mobilize against politically ascendant minorities. It received the Davis Center Book Prize in political and social studies (2020).
She is the recipient of the 2015 Best Article Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s European Politics and Society Section, for her article “Revenge of the Radical Right”, and also the recipient of the 2017 Best Paper Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section, for her paper co-authored with Cristina Corduneanu-Huci “Patronage, Trust and State Capacity: The Historical Trajectories of Clientelism”.
She is currently serving as an editor of East European Politics.
Visit Lenka BuštĂková’s page at ASU.
🙜 Judith A. Byfield 🙞
Judith A. Byfield is Professor in the Department of History at Cornell. The primary focus of her scholarship has been women’s social and economic history in Nigeria. Her research into in-depth studies on tie-dye production, World War II, Nigerian women’s political activism and nationalism.
Currently, she is a Fulbright Global Scholar beginning a new project, “Curry Goat and Gari: West Indian Women in 20thCentury Lagosian Society.”  It is inspired by the West Indian women she met during her research trips to Nigeria. Many met their husbands in the UK and moved to Nigeria with them.  She became fascinated by the very creative ways in which they bridged their Caribbean and British backgrounds with Nigerian cultures.  This project hopes to reveal new insights about diaspora formation and transnationalism through the experiences of these dynamic and enterprising women.
Visit Judith A. Byfield’s page at Cornell.
🙜 Dan Slater 🙞
Dan Slater specializes in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He comes to Michigan after twelve years on the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he served as Director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and associate member in the Department of Sociology. His book examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. He is also a co-editor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford University Press, 2008), which assesses the contributions of Southeast Asian political studies to theoretical knowledge in comparative politics. His published articles can be found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Perspectives on Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics, as well as Asia-oriented journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, Journal of East Asian Studies, South East Asia Research, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and TRANS.
Visit Dan Slater’s page at UMich.
🙜 Miguel Centeno 🙞
Miguel Centeno is Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Vice-Dean of the Scholl of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). He has published many articles, chapters, and books. His latest publications are War and Society (Polity 2016), Global Capitalism (Polity 2010), States in the Developing World (Cambridge UP, 017) and State and Nation Making in the Iberian World (Vol I, Cambridge UP 2013; Vol. II 2018, Vol. III 2021). He is also working a new book project on the sociology of discipline. He the founder of the Research Community on Global Systemic Risk funded by PIIRS from 2013 (http://risk.princeton.edu). This project has produced several journal articles and chapters and will result in two new books in 2021. He has served as the head of First College, the founding Director of PIIRS, head of PLAS, and chair of Sociology. 2001, he founded PUPP.