Faculty

Our faculty are scholars, practitioners and leaders who have worked as senior advisors in government organizations, consultants for multinational companies and are widely published. They are experts in policy advising, international finance, project management, and more.


Matthias Matthijs

Director of the Master of Arts in Global Risk and Associate Professor of International Political Economy

Matthias Matthijs is Director of the Master of Arts in Global Risk and Associate Professor of International Political Economy. His research focuses on the politics of economic crises, the role of economic ideas in economic policymaking, and the politics of regional integration.

At SAIS, he teaches courses in international relations and comparative politics, and he was twice awarded the Max M. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Teaching, both in 2011 and 2015. He is also a Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and serves as the Chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Matthijs is co-editor of The Future of the Euro, published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005), published by Routledge in 2011. The latter is based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the Samuel H. Beer Prize for Best Dissertation in British Politics by a North American scholar, awarded by the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2010.

Matthijs has authored numerous peer reviewed articles that have been published in academic journals including Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Review of International Political Economy, the Journal of Common Market Studies, Governance, Government and Opposition, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of European Integration, Comparative European Politics, and The International Spectator. He has also written multiple articles and essays for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Democracy, Survival, and Current History.

Among various other research and writing projects, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript that delves into the collapse of national elite consensus around European integration.

Matthijs previously taught at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC from 2008 to 2012, and was a visiting assistant professor of international political economy at SAIS Europe in Bologna, Italy during the spring semester of 2010 and the academic year 2016-17. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank’s Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS) from 2005 to 2007 and for the Economist Intelligence Unit from 2009 to 2011.

Matthijs received his BSc in applied economics from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

View his Google Scholar profile here.

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Mahrukh Doctor

Adjunct Professor of International Relations and Latin American Studies

Mahrukh Doctor is Adjunct Professor of International Relations and Latin American Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Hull.

Her research interests include foreign policy and the political economy of Brazil, in addition to regionalism in Latin America as a whole (especially Mercosur and EU-Mercosur relations). She is author of Business-State Relations in Brazil: Challenges of the Port Reform Lobby (New York: Routledge, 2017). Her research has been published in International Affairs, Review of International Political Economy, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Journal of Latin American Studies.

She is a Non-Executive Director of the BlackRock Latin American Investment Trust, listed on the London Stock Exchange. She has held previous positions at the Centre for Brazilian Studies at Oxford and the World Bank in addition to her 12-year period of teaching at the Johns Hopkins University (SAIS-Europe) in Bologna. Professor Doctor has been a visiting academic at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Universidade de São Paulo, and SAIS-Europe. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2000.

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Veronica Anghel

Adjunct Professor of Risk in International Politics and Economics at SAIS Europe; Max Weber Fellow, European University Institute, Italy; and Research Fellow, re:constitution Democracy and the Rule of Law in Europe, Berlin

Veronica Anghel is an Adjunct Professor of Risk in International Politics and Economics at Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe. Dr. Anghel held research fellowships at Stanford University (Fulbright), Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the Institute for Human Sciences Vienna, the Institute for Central Europe Vienna, the University of Bordeaux, and the Institute for Government in Vienna. She received her PhD summa cum laude from the University of Bucharest in co- direction with the University of Bordeaux. Dr. Anghel worked as a foreign affairs advisor for the Romanian Presidential Administration (2014-15) and a Diplomatic Adviser for the Romanian Senate (2012-14). Dr. Anghel provides risk analysis for consultancy outfits on European integration, rule of law issues and party politics in post-communist Europe. Among these, she works for the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxford Analytica. Dr. Anghel is the recipient of the 2020 ‘Rising Star’ Award of the European Consortium of Political Research.

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Pravin Krishna

Chung Ju Yung Professor of International Economics

Pravin Krishna is the Chung Ju Yung Distinguished Professor of International Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University, where he is jointly appointed in the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC and the Department of Economics in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS) in Baltimore.

Professor Krishna is also co-chair of the Bernard L. Schwartz Globalization Initiative at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Professor Krishna’s areas of research interest include international economics, international political economy, the political economy of policy reform, economic development, and the political economy of India. His research has been published in numerous journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, International Organization, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Policy Reform. A recipient of research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he is the author of “Trade Blocs: Economics and Politics” (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and, along with Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, is co-editor of “Trading Blocs: Alternate Analyses of Preferential Trade Agreements” (MIT Press, 1999).

He holds a BA in Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University.

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Mark M. Blyth

Adjunct Lecturer

Mark M. Blyth is an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. He also held appointments in Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and in the Department of Political Science.

His research interests include international and comparative political economy and he aims to be as interdisciplinary as possible, drawing from political science, economics, sociology, complexity theory, and evolutionary theory. Professor Blyth’s work falls into several related areas: the politics of ideas, how institutions change, macroeconomic regimes and growth models, and why people believe certain economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.

Professor Blyth grew up in Dundee, Scotland and received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1999.

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Jonas Nahm

Assistant Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment

Jonas Nahm is an assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC.

Professor Nahm’s research interests focus on the intersection of economic and industrial policy, energy policy, and environmental politics. He studies the role of the state in processes of industrial restructuring that accompany policy responses to climate change and clean energy transitions more broadly. Professor Nahm’s work focuses on clean energy transitions in China, Germany, and the United States to engage two debates in comparative political economy: (1) the role of the state in shaping the international division of labor in highly globalized industries, and (2) sources of state capacity in interest group politics during periods of industrial restructuring.

His book project, titled “Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy,” uses the development of renewable energy sectors to investigate the political economy of innovation and industrial development in highly globalized industries. The manuscript shows that new possibilities for collaboration among firms in the global economy have reinforced national patterns of industrial specialization. Globalization not only continues to be mediated by domestic institutions, it also causes persistent and consequential divergence of such institutions and national industrial specializations over time.

Professor Nahm’s research has been funded by the Minerva Research Initiative and the U.S. Army Research Office, the German National Academic Foundation, the World Bank Institute and the Korean Development Institute, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Harvard Center for European Studies, the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Caroll Wilson Foundation. He was an MIT energy fellow and a fellow of the German National Academic Foundation.

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Silvia Merler

Adjunct Lecturer

Silvia Merler is an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. She is also head of ESG & policy research at Algebris.

Professor Merler has conducted extensive research on topics of European political economy, with attention to European macro and financial economics issues, as well as EU institutions and governance.

Before joining Algebris, Merler served as affiliate fellow at Bruegel — Brussels’ economic policy think tank — and as economic analyst at the European Commission’s DG ECFIN.

Silvia holds a BA and MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University in Milan, and a PhD in European and Eurasian Studies with focus on European political economy from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She has completed the CFA Certificate in ESG Investing, and two Responsible Investment courses offered by the UN PRI Academy.

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Seth Kaplan

Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)

Seth D. Kaplan is a professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.

He is also a senior adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) and consultant to organizations including the World Bank, USAID, State Department, and OECD.

Professor Kaplan is the author of two books on fragile states: “Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development” (Praeger Security International, 2008) and “Betrayed: Promoting Inclusive Development in Fragile States” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He also authored one book on human rights and culture, “Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: Universality Without Uniformity” (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is working on a book on reversing social breakdown.

He is the author of the U.S. State Department’s “Political Transitions Analysis Framework” (2020) and co-author of the United Nations – World Bank flagship report “Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict” and USAID’s “Fragility Assessment Framework” (2018). He was also the lead author, coordinator, and managing editor of both an eight country comparative study for the United States Institute of Peace on social contract formation in fragile states and a 100-page flagship publication for IFIT articulating a new approach to regime transitions in post-conflict and post-authoritarian countries.

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Ashley Barlow

The continuous collaboration between professors and students has been so amazing. The professors are all working professionals, and their knowledge has allowed me to develop quantitative analysis skills in global economics, macroeconomics, and statistics.


Ashley Barlow, MA in Global Risk (online), Class of 2023 (anticipated)

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