Garay Joins ILR Faculty
Candelaria Garay has been appointed an associate professor at ILR and began teaching during the 2024 spring semester.
She comes to Cornell following time as an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Torcuato Di Tella University in Argentina and as a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she also served as an associate and assistant professor between 2011 and 2020.
“Candelaria Garay is a superb scholar who will add to the international strength of ILR’s Global Labor and Work department,” said Alexander J. Colvin, Ph.D. '99, ILR’s Kenneth F. Kahn '69 Dean and the Martin F. Scheinman '75, M.S. '76, Professor of Conflict Resolution. “Her expertise on labor in Latin America enhances our coverage of an important region, and her courses will provide exciting new learning opportunities for our students.”
Candelaria Garay
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., Political Science (University of California, Berkeley)
• Graduate Studies, Public Policy and Administration (Universidad de San Andrés)
• Graduate Studies, Nonprofit Organizations (Universidad de San Andrés)
• B.A., Sociology (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Garay’s research interests include social policy and redistribution, social movements and interest representation, and environmental and health policy. In her book, "Social Policy Expansion in Latin America" (Cambridge University Press, 2016), she characterizes and explains the recent expansion and cross-country variation in social policy programs (income transfers, pensions and health care services) for populations historically excluded from social protection in Latin America. The book received the 2017 Robert A. Dahl Award of the American Political Science Association and an honorable mention for the 2018 Bryce Wood Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association.
Garay's second book project will explain why coalitions between labor unions and informal-sector and/or rural worker movements have formed in some developing countries but not others. In another book project, “Element Series in the Politics of Development,” she studies social policy expansion in Latin America and other regions of the Global South. Cambridge University Press is publishing both books.
In other research, Garay focuses on social movements and policy trajectories, the design and implementation of environmental legislation, the politics of sub-national health care services and the relationships between political parties and social and labor organizations.