Dan Slater has accepted the role of Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) and a professorship in political science. He will begin his professorship in the Department of Political Science in July 2017 and begin serving as WCED Director in July 2018. Professor Slater comes to U-M from the University of Chicago, where his research focuses on political movements in Southeast Asia. Allen Hicken will continue to serve as the interim WCED Director in 2017-18.

Dan Slater specializes in the politics of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He is currently 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 at the University of Chicago. His book manuscript 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. He is also a co-editor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford University Press, 2008), which assesses the contributions of Southeast Asian political studies to theoretical knowledge in comparative politics. His published articles can be found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Perspectives on Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics, as well as Asia-oriented journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, Journal of East Asian Studies, South East Asia Research, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and TRANS. He has been teaching at the University of Chicago since receiving his PhD from Emory University in 2005. Before commencing his PhD studies at Emory he received a BA in international relations and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA in international studies from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, and spent ten months as a Fulbright scholar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.