Expertise: comparative political economy, development, social welfare

Samantha Vortherms, political science assistant professor, comes to UCI this fall following a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Her research focuses on comparative political economy, development, and social welfare. Her current book project, Between the Center and the People: Localized Citizenship in China, examines sub-national variation in access to citizenship rights in China. Specifically, she looks at how migrants within China interact with state services and how they get access to services when they enter new cities because - based on China’s system - people from different cities are treated as foreigners, rather than domestic migrants.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, and the Social Science Research Council's Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, among others.

From 2014-2016, she was a visiting research fellow at the National School of Development's China Center for Health Economics Research at Peking University. Before completing her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she received her M.A. in international relations at the University of Chicago, A.M. in public policy from University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, and a B.A. from the University of Richmond.

She’s excited to join UCI’s Department of Political Science which is known for valuing both world class research and teaching.