My year at CASBS (in 2003-2004) was transformational and deeply
meaningful for me. It changed my scholarly identity, making my historical
research more thoughtful, my statistical research more rigorous. My
writing improved and I found myself truly humbled by the experience and
insight of the Fellows around me.
I made friends with whom my family and I still keep in touch, and there
have been reunions in Cambridge, Los Angeles, San Francisco, even the
Canary Islands.
In the years following my CASBS year, I published an important
mathematical paper whose essential proofs I completed at the Center
(“Protection without Capture,” /American Political Science Review/
2004), and later, my second book (/Reputation and Power: Organizational
Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA/ (Princeton, 2010)), as
well as some pivotal papers on the history and political economy of U.S.
pharmaceutical regulation. I also started a long-term study of
antislavery petitioning in the United States. This past year, the first
product of that multi-year study finally came to fruition, with the lead
article in the August 2014 /American Political Science Review/, entitled
“When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the
Political Mobilization of American Women.” This article has just been
awarded the American Political Science Association’s Mary Parker Follett
Prize for the top article published on Politics and History in 2014.
The first draft of that paper was presented at CASBS in the Fall of
2003, and while it took another eight years to complete the data
collection, my CASBS presentation decisively shaped that paper and my
ongoing book project on the multilingual nineteenth-century explosion of
North American petitioning.
I learned from people as diverse as the communications scholar Kathleen
Jamieson, the historians Richard White and Walter Johnson, the
anthropologist Webb Keane, the literature scholar Adela Pinch, and the
economist David Lee. I am deeply grateful for the experience and my
family and I cherish our year there.
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