Faculty
Faculty
Faculty Members
Dr. Ruth Ben-Artzi
Department Chair
Howley Hall 304
401-865-2840
rbenartz@providence.edu
Dr. Susan McCarthy
Assistant Department Chair
401-865-2626
SMCCARTH@providence.edu
Teaching in one of the PC’s largest departments, political science faculty members possess expertise in an array of topics, including campaigns and elections, civic engagement, communications and the media, constitutional law, democracy and development, Latino and black politics, globalization, race, gender and sexuality, social justice and equality. Our faculty study many aspects of American politics as well as numerous other countries, with particular strengths in East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
For more information, we invite you to browse the profile links on this page.
Visiting Faculty!
Dr. Lotem Halevy
Dr. Lotem Halevy specializes in contemporary issues related to extremism, populism, nationalism, and the decline of centrist parties across the traditional divide between Europe’s Western “center” and Eastern “periphery,” particularly during periods of liberalization and electoral diversification. Across both her historical and contemporary work, she analyzes how political parties, amid the turbulence of changing party systems, shape distinct pathways of regime consolidation through contestation over who is included in the nation and, subsequently, who has access to the nation-state. Her work therefore also examines how diversity shapes politics in predominantly authoritarian regimes and the boundaries of national identity, including processes of racialization, access to citizenship, and civil rights and liberties.
She is currently completing work on her first book project, The Liberal Origins of Fascism: The Politics of Access in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book explains why some countries tended toward national socialism, a secular form of fascism, while many other, comparatively understudied countries embraced religious fascism in the interwar period. She traces this divergence in fascist regimes to the ways in which political parties struggled over liberalization in ethnically, religiously, and nationally diverse societies. The book draws on several qualitative case studies of constitutional changes to voting rights and legal changes governing state-society relations, alongside statistical analyses of previously unavailable data from the constituent states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Before coming to Providence, Halevy was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence, The Politics of Inequality, at the University of Konstanz, after completing her PhD in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. During graduate school, she was the Queen Elizabeth Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University (2022–2023). Before that, she was a visiting PhD student at the London School of Economics’ European Institute.
