Dan Slater (Ph.D. Emory, 2005) specializes in the politics and history of dictatorship and democracy, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He came to Michigan in 2017 after twelve years on the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he served as Director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and associate member in the Department of Sociology. His book examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. His latest book is entitled From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022), which explores why rapid economic development has led to democratization in some Asian countries but not others.

Head of the MA in Political Science Program at UIII. He was a Fulbright Scholar and earned Ph.D. in Political Science from Northern Illinois University, USA. Dr. Arif holds M.Sc. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK, and MA in Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies from UIN Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta. Before joining UIII, he taught research methods and political Islam at the Graduate School of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah. Dr. Arif has been also a research associate at the SMERU Institute, Jakarta. His research interest focuses on comparative politics, politics of development, religion and politics, and comparative and mixed methods. His works appeared in the IDS Bulletin, Journal of International Development, and Journal of Development Perspective.