The 2022 URPE Steering Committee Election is now open. All current members of URPE are eligible to participate.

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There are six open positions on the Steering Committee and seven candidates running for these open positions. Please vote for up to six candidates. Scroll down to see each candidate’s bio.

Those (re)elected to the Steering Committee will serve a three-year term, starting Fall 2022 until Fall 2025. Online voting is open from August 30th to September 24th 2022.

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Below are the candidate bios:

Erik Olsen
University of Missouri Kansas City.

Erik Olsen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He earned a  Ph.D., at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include Political Economy and Microeconomics, with particular emphasis on the political economy of the firm, worker cooperatives, and participatory management. He is one of the co-editors of the Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics, which includes contributions from many URPE members.

Personal Statement
I have served on the URPE Steering Committee since 2013 and would like to continue this work. In my time on the committee I have worked to increase URPE support for graduate students, done conference organizing, and helped URPE effectively manage its finances. Since elected I have served on the Finance Committee, and worked closely with the national office on budgeting and financial reporting. I helped create the URPE Dissertation Fellowship, and have served as a reviewer for applications since it was created. I also worked closely with Steve Theberge in organizing the UPRE 50th Anniversary Conference in 2018. If re-elected to the Steering Committee I would like to work on making URPE more effective in supporting feminist, black, and Latinx political economy, as well as continuing my current commitments to the organization.

Jennifer Cohen
Miami University

Jennifer Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University and holds a joint appointment as a researcher in the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She earned her PhD in Economics at the University of Massachusetts in 2012. Prior to her current appointments, she taught in the Department of Economics at Whitman College (2012-2016).

Personal Statement
I have published in medical journals as well as in RRPE, Rethinking Marxism, History of Political Economy (HOPE), Gender and Development, Feminist Economics, and Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, including three articles on feminism and URPE. One article is on the formation of the Women’s Caucus in 1971 and the historiography of feminism in economics. The second piece offers strategies for repositioning feminism as a critical source of insight in radical political economy. The most recent article (forthcoming in HOPE) considers how economics is reproduced as a “man’s field.” I regularly attend URPE conferences and events. If elected to serve on the Steering Committee, I will continue to engage in outreach to strengthen the study of the many contributions of feminist analyses to radical political economics.

Özgür Orhangazi
Kadir Has University

Özgür Orhangazi is a professor of economics at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006. He taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago (2006-2011), has been an invited researcher at the Central Bank of Venezuela (2009), a visiting scholar at the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst (2017), and a visiting professor at University Paris 13 (2018). He also taught classes at Boğaziçi University, City University of New York, University of Seoul and served as graduate faculty at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He published extensively on financialization, financial and economic crises, and alternative economic policies. His recent research focuses on concentration and monopolization in the US economy and financial fragility and crises in Turkey and other developing economies.

Personal Statement

He has a long history of participating in URPE activities (since 2000) and he has been serving on the SC for the last 3 years. He has published in and refereed for the RRPE. He has been contributing to URPE  by serving on the Steering Committee and collaborating with other members in the quest to promote radical political economy, increase the visibility and impact of the organization, and contribute to the international collaborations of URPE. He believes his experience and extensive international network is of use to the Steering Committee and URPE in general.

Sirisha Naidu

University of Missouri Kansas-City

Sirisha Naidu is Associate Professor of Economics and affiliate faculty in the Department of Race, Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri Kansas-City. Her research focuses on feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change and ecological shifts, the interweaving of production and reproduction in the economies of the global South, and informal and precarious work in the global economy.

Personal Statement
Given the current political moment, URPE could play an renewed role in the ongoing struggles of the working classes. With that objective in mind I am interested in the active recruitment of radical political economists from the global South and historically underrepresented minorities in the U.S. as well as creating greater space within URPE to issues of environmental and climate change, and radical political economy perspectives on gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity and caste. Additionally I would like to devote energy on increasing visibility of the work of our members — on the frontlines of social movements, and policy-making — to model the relevance of praxis to a new generation of radical political economists.

Election Statement

 I would like to be elected to an additional 3-year term on the Steering Committee of  URPE. I have served on the SC for many years,and am able to bring to it an historical perspective on the many issues that URPE is facing today. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the RRPE and as such can contribute to the coordination of these two decision-making bodies of URPE.

Within the SC, I am an active member of two SC sub-committees: the  URPE Graduate Fellowship Program Committee and the Fundraising Committee. I understand my responsibility within URPE to be one of furthering the ability of URPE to contribute to the struggle against all forms of exploitation and oppression through the development and dissemination of radical political economic analysis.

Daniela Cialfi

University of CHIETI-PESCARA, Italy.

I am a cognitive and behavioural economist, heterodox economist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of CHIETI-PESCARA, Italy. Before this, I worked at Procter & Gamble. I hold a PhD in the Human Science curriculum in Economics and Statistics from the University of CHIETI-PESCARA, and an MS in management, finance and development from the University of CHIETI-PESCARA.I am a board member of the Society of Experimental Finance and the Italian Post-Keynesian Society and Book Review Editor and Editor of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter. I am an cognitive-behavioural economist with an interest in contributing to a deeper understanding of the impact of data science on policy and governance. I employ field, lab, and lab-in-the-field experiments, develop survey tools and analyse large panel data sets to better understand economic decision- making and its psychological underpinnings, generating insights to inform theory as well as real world decision makers in the areas of heterodox economics. The majority of my current research applies field and lab-in-the-field experiments to test insights from classical and behavioural economics in the contexts of the application of data science of application to issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the and multi-correlated disciplinary research.

David Neilson

University of Waikato, NZ

I have just published ‘The Struggle for Democratic Socialism’ in the twenty first century with Nova. I have had numerous articles in ‘Capital & Class’ and several in ‘Review of Radical Political Economics’. In the last year I have published several articles on covid19. I write in the fields of mid range radical political economy and neo-Marxist class theory. I am presently working on a book with Routledge on uneven development.I am presently a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Waikato New Zealand. I have been associated with RRPE since publication of my article on the French Regulation School in 2012. In 2021 RRPE published my article on ‘regressive nationalism and the neoliberal model of development’. I have had very positive experiences with the review and editorial process at RRPE. I also review for RRPE, which I enjoy because of the supportive and cooperative approach taken with the reviewers and authors.

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