A Research Program on COVID-19: Three Examples

The talk is about the research within SWECOV, a large research pogram on the COVID-19 pandemic. The program is built on a rich set of medical, social and economic microdata from Sweden and was started when I served on the Swedish Corona Commission. In the seminar, I will give three examples of concrete projects. The first escribes the inequaltites, along different social gradients, in the medical, social and economic outfalls of the pandemic.

American Life Histories (with D. Lagakos and S. Michalopoulos)

In the late 1930s, a team of writers traveled the United States to record the life stories of thousands of older Americans for posterity. We combine close human readings with text analysis by large-language models (LLMs) to turn these unstructured texts into a rich data set that captures the narrators' experiences, economic fortunes, and perspectives on what brought happiness, satisfaction, and meaning into their lives. We first demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, LLMs can detect and analyse factual information in this corpus in a comparable way to human readers.

Black Empowerment and White Mobilization: The Effects of the Voting Rights Act (with G. Facchini, M. Tabellini, and C. Testa)

How did southern whites respond to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA)? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we document that the VRA increases both Black and white political participation. Consistent with the VRA triggering white counter-mobilization, the surge in white registrations is concentrated in counties where African Americans represent a political threat.

Luis Prenninger

I’m a second-year MPhil candidate in Politics (Political Theory). My thesis project is in social metaphysics, focusing on epistemological issues in the social construction of gender and the sex/gender distinction in Sally Haslanger’s work.  

In 2025/26, I will be co-convening the Oxford Workshop on Work in Progress in Political Theory (OWIPT).

Jacob Hougie

I'm a first-year MPhil in Political Theory, based at Worcester College. My interests lie across a broad range of political theory, but particularly with communitarian and realist critiques of liberalism and their underlying philosophical principles.

Before coming to Oxford, I studied Human, Social and Political Science at the University of Cambridge. There, I focused on the History of Political Thought and worked on applying the historical method to the work of Jonathan Sacks for the first time.

Alex Baxter

I am a first-year in the MPhil International Relations program and a member of Lincoln College. My primary research interest is investigating the effects of changes in national identity on countries' diplomatic and defence policies, specifically in the case of the UK in the post-Brexit era; I also maintain broader interests in constructivist structural IR theory and International Political Economy.

Jordan Edwards-Zinger

Jordan Edwards-Zinger is a current second-year MPhil student in Comparative Government at Brasenose College. Her research interests are grounded in Soviet and post-Soviet authoritarianism, the formal and informal institutions within modern post-Soviet states, and the changing nature of autocratic politics.

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