A Broader Perspective

The ILR School's world-of-work expertise is now even broader and deeper.

This fall, six new tenure-track faculty join ILR's economics, labor relations, law and history, international and comparative labor, and social statistics departments.

Harry Katz, Kenneth F. Kahn Dean, said the group -- with credentials from universities including Harvard, Yale and Oxford -- brings specialties to ILR that will broaden and enrich the curriculum as well as the school’s research and outreach work.

"We recruited faculty not only to fill vacant positions, but in anticipation of future retirements. We wanted to be proactive."

"ILR always makes offers to top candidates, but I think we did especially well this year because we were in an academic job market that didn't seem to be as active. That gave us a strategic competitive advantage."

Katz said the success of fundraising efforts in recent years provided hiring resources. The addition of six faculty members, he adds, gives ILR a more balanced demographic profile that will position the school to sustain high-quality teaching and research.

The new faculty include:

• Eli Friedman, assistant professor, international and comparative labor, an expert on China who does research and teaching on Chinese labor issues. Friedman holds his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
• Louis Hyman, assistant professor, labor relations, law and history, a business historian with a focus on the history of credit. Hyman earned a PhD in history from Harvard University.
• Richard Mansfield, assistant professor, economics, an expert on the economics of education. Mansfield holds a PhD in economics from Yale University.
• David Matteson, assistant professor, social statistics, a joint appointment with the university's Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). Matteson earned a PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago.
• Victoria Prowse, assistant professor, economics, whose specialties include experimental economics -- using lab experiments to gather data and analyze economics questions. Prowse received her PhD in economics from the University of Oxford.
• Christopher Riddell, associate professor, labor relations, law and history, whose research measures the impacts of public policies on union organizing and collective bargaining. Riddell received his PhD in industrial relations from the University of Toronto.