Trinity Is Well Represented at Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association

Several members of the Trinity community represented the College recently at the American Political Science Association’s 121st Annual Meeting and Exhibition. The conference, “Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times,” was held September 11 to 14, 2025, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Faculty members who presented papers and spoke on panels during the conference included Dang Do, assistant professor of political science; Belén Fernández Milmanda, associate professor of political science and international studies; Hernan Flom, senior lecturer in political science; Sidra Hamidi, assistant professor of political science; Reo Matsuzaki, associate professor of political science; Gabriel Salgado, assistant professor of political science; and Abigail Fisher Williamson, associate professor of political science and public policy and law.

Matsuzaki said, “I think the robust representation of our faculty at APSA speaks to the importance of the research that we are doing at Trinity.”

A paper co-authored by Matsuzaki won the Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award from APSA’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group. The award is presented annually to the best peer-reviewed article employing interpretive methodologies and methods. Matsuzaki and Fabian Drixler, a historian at Yale University, won for their article, “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,” in Politics & Society.

Terwiel, who is a co-director of Trinity’s Prison Education Project (TPEP), received the Best Paper Award from APSA’s Foundations of Political Theory Section, for the paper, “The Power of New Rights: Extreme Heat, the Right to Comfort, and the Futures of Abolition Democracy.” The paper is the final chapter of her forthcoming book, Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, December 2025).

A book by Fernández Milmanda—Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2024)—was shortlisted as a finalist for the Luebbert Book Prize. The award is given by the Comparative Politics Section for the best book in the field of comparative politics published in the previous two years.

In addition to faculty members, alumnus Jake Loor ’25—currently a graduate student at Yale Law School—also presented a paper, “Performative Policing: The Disappearing Act of Stop-and-Frisk in New York City,” written with Flom and Matsuzaki.