MPIfG Scholar in Residence 2024

Bașak Kuș
 

Bașak Kuș is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2008. Prior to joining Wesleyan in 2012, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and Princeton Universities and taught political economy and public policy at University College Dublin in Ireland.

Bașak Kuș is a professor in the Government Department at Wesleyan University. A central question drives her diverse research interests: How do governments conceptualize and respond to crises and risks across different fields, whether the financial sector, climate change, or national security? Professor Kus is the author of Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press). She is also the editor of two journal special issues: "Politics of Financialization" (in Economic and Social Review) and "Credit, Consumption, and Debt" (in International Journal of Comparative Sociology). Currently, she is working on a book-length project tracing the historical evolution of US climate policy from the initial environmental protection debates in the 1970s to its current form, emphasizing the role of economists in shaping the conceptualizations of and tools to tackle climate risks. She is also co-editing a special issue on "Greening the Economy: Towards a New Political Economy" for the journal Regulation & Governance. Kus obtained her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Wesleyan, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and Yale Universities and taught public policy at University College Dublin.

In her lecture series “Trade-Offs: The State, Economistic Thinking, and Risk Regulation in the Age of Crises,” Bașak Kuș will share insights into how governments conceptualize and mitigate risk, and the significant role that economists and economistic reasoning play in shaping these processes.