UAF Department of Political Science Contact Information

Dr. Brandon M. Boylan is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). His primary research fields include international security, political violence, terrorism, ethnic conflict, and separatist movements. His research has been published in Journal of Common Market Studies, International Studies Perspectives, International Public Management Journal, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Nations and Nationalism, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, among others. His collaborative projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education. At UAF, he is the Director of Arctic and Northern Studies. He teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in international relations, comparative politics, and research methods. He is faculty advisor for Model United Nations and Model Arctic Council. He has participated in international security workshops sponsored by American University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh.

A former public defender, Dr. Carol Gray is an Assistant Professor of Public Law at UAF, teaching courses in political science and law. She is available to advise any UAF students interested in applying to law school. Gray obtained her JD from Northeastern University School of Law and her Masters in Advocacy (LLM) from Georgetown University Law Center. She also holds a PhD and Masters of Political Science, and certificates in Human Rights; Feminist Studies; and Race, Ethnicity and Politics, from the University of Connecticut.  Gray was a Fulbright Scholar in Montreal; a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in Egypt; a Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, and a National Association for Public Interest Law Fellow at the Georgia Resource Center which represents those on Georgia’s Death Row. Gray was also a UMass W.E.B. Du Bois Community College Fellow, a Wood/Raith Gender Identity Fellow, and holder of the Mary Miles Bibb post-doctoral teaching fellowship at Framingham State University. Her research is interdisciplinary exploring law, politics and human rights as they intersect with issues of race, class, and gender. She has published in the CLR James Journal; the Worcester Review; and the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy and its Black Issues in Philosophy series blog. She published a book chapter on the lack of due process at Guantanamo and has a forthcoming co-authored book chapter on the role of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Israeli foreign policy, an edited volume to be published by Routledge.

Dr. Alexander Keller Hirsch is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His primary teaching and research field is political theory, with a focus on moral and political theories of justice, Indigenous thought, democratic theory, and politics and art. He is the co-editor of The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss (Roman & Littlefield), and the editor of Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution, and Repair (Routledge). His scholarly work has appeared in Postmodern Culture, New Political Science, Humanities, Social Identities, Theory & Event, Contemporary Political Theory, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Law, Culture & Humanities, and more. At UAF, Dr. Hirsch teaches Ethics & Society, American Political Thought, Contemporary Political Thought, Political Ideologies, Classical Political Thought, and more. Dr. Hirsch holds a Ph.D. in Politics and the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. Amy Lauren Lovecraft is a Professor of Political Science and has served as University of Alaska faculty since 2001.   She received her B.A. in 1994 from Trinity University and began graduate studies in Vienna, Austria pursuing her undergraduate focus on international economics and European integration. Unable to resist North America for long she returned to earn her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin concentrating on American political development, public policy, and political theory. Her dissertation analyzed transboundary water policy between the United States and Canada in the Great Lakes. At UAF her courses include the Law and Society suite – Politics and Judicial Process, Con Law I and Con Law II – and, among others, Public Policy, Political Economy, and Political Behavior. Working to foster interdisciplinary engagement among students and faculty she is active in the Arctic and Northern Studies and the Resilience and Adaptation programs at UAF. In her research, Dr. Lovecraft explores power dynamics in social-ecological systems. Her scholarship has been published as book chapters and in journals such asArctic, Marine Policy, The American Review of Canadian Studies, Polar Geography, Policy Studies Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Recently she is co-editor of the transdisciplinary volume North by 2020: Perspectives on Alaska’s Changing Social-Ecological Systems (Autumn 2011) that developed from collaboration during the International Polar Year. She has been a Dickey Fellow in Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College and a Fulbright Research Scholar in Norway at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO). She has served two terms as a member of the U.S. National Academies Polar Research Board and is he Associate Director of the North by 2020 Forum.  Currently, as the Principle Investigator on a three-year National Science Foundation grant, she leads a team working with resident experts in the Northwest Arctic and North Slope Boroughs on scenarios development asking "what is required for healthy sustainable communities in Arctic Alaska by 2040?"

Dr. Meek is an interdisciplinary social scientist specializing in environmental and marine policy. She has worked with and researched policy options for community-based resource management and collaborative management since the mid-1990s and now teach courses related to government and politics in Canada, the Arctic, comparative Indigenous rights and research design for graduate students and undergraduate students at UAF. She has active research projects related to marine mammals and environmental change, governance of social-ecological systems, adaptive governance of Arctic systems, and policy learning from disasters. She has published in the journals Global Environmental Change, Marine Policy, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Polar Geography, Journal of Environmental Management, and the Alaska Journal of Anthropology and is a contributor to a new volume from Cambridge University Press, "Principles for Building Resilience."

Dr. Jeremy Speight is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UAF. He is also affiliated with the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Arctic & Northern Studies programs. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 2016. His research agenda is comprised of two interrelated streams focusing on (a) political authority and the production of political order in civil war and (b) the durability or institutionalization of wartime rebel governance after the conclusion of violent conflict. His geographic area of specialization is West Africa, particularly Côte d’Ivoire, where he has conducted extensive field research in since 2010. Dr. Speight’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Afrique Contemporaine, African Affairs, Civil Wars, and the Canadian Journal of African Studies. Dr. Speight teaches in the political science subfield of comparative politics. At UAF, he teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes, including Democracy and Global Society, Comparative Politics, Political Science Research Methods, Political Economy, Comparative Environmental Politics, Global Political Economy of the Environment, and the ACNS Thesis Writing Workshop.

Russell Luke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UAF, teaching courses across American Politics. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from Georgia State University, and a B.A. in Political Science from SUNY Buffalo State College. His research examines American political behavior in the modern era, the origins and impacts of political polarization, the electoral effects of climate change, political messaging and framing, and the influence of institutional constraints on voting behavior. His primary research agenda centers on the intersection of political attitudes and election outcomes, employing quantitative methodologies, spatial and formal modeling, and causal inference. His research has been published in peer-reviewed publications such as Democratization, Climatic Change, Questions in Politics, among others.