On July 1, 2011, Stephen Kotkin, the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History Professor of International Affairs, assumed the duties of vice dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Nolan McCarty, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, who had been serving in that capacity, has been named the chair of the Department of Politics at the University.

“I greatly appreciate Nolan’s superb leadership over the past six years, and I look forward to working with him in his new role as chair of the Department of Politics,” said Wilson School Dean Christina Paxson.   “And I am very pleased that Steve Kotkin has agreed to serve as vice dean and thank him for his willingness to take on these new responsibilities.”  

As vice dean, Kotkin will oversee the graduate and undergraduate academic programs for the Wilson School. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1989 and is a specialist on authoritarian regimes (he notes that the Berlin Wall fell just two months into his first class). Between 1995 and 2008 he directed Princeton's Russian Studies Program , which became Russian and Eurasian Studies under his watch. His books include Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (2001; new edition 2008) and Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (2009). He is currently working on a book titled Stalin’s World, which he describes as a “kind of history” of the world as seen from Stalin’s desk.   Professor Kotkin served as the business book reviewer for The New York Times Sunday business section from 2005 to 2009.   He writes reviews and essays for The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is a former chairman of the editorial board at Princeton University Press. Kotkin has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and during the summer of 2011 is a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.   He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

“The Woodrow Wilson School has a spectacular body of students, faculty, staff and alumni, and I look forward immensely to the opportunity to serve as the new vice dean,” Kotkin said.   “It is a great honor.”

McCarty served as associate dean of the Woodrow Wilson School from 2005 to 2011; while the title of the position has changed from associate dean to vice dean, the roles are the same.   He also served as acting dean from 2007 to 2008. McCarty’s areas of interest include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political methodology. He is the recipient of the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellowship from the Hoover Institution and the John M. Olin Fellowship in Political Economy. McCarty is the author of numerous scholarly articles, which have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He is also the coauthor of The Realignment of National Politics and the Income Distribution and Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Walras-Pareto Lectures). He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.