Melina Platas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on the politics of development, organized around three themes: 1) culture and development, 2) information, accountability, and service delivery, and 3) migration. Her current book project, Culture and the Persistence of Inequality, presents the colonial roots of educational inequality across religious groups in Africa, and the cultural factors that have allowed inequality to persist. She employs a variety of methods, ranging from field experiments to ethnography. The regional focus of her research is sub-Saharan Africa, where she has worked and conducted fieldwork in eight countries since 2005. She is a faculty fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).
Melina is a contributor for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and a panelist on KfM‘s The Hot Seat and NTV Uganda’s Fourth Estate in Uganda. She worked as a reporter at the Daily Monitor and The Independent magazine in Kampala, Uganda, from 2007-2009. She received a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2016, and a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University in 2007.
Melina Platas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on the politics of development, organized around three themes: 1) culture and development, 2) information, accountability, and service delivery, and 3) migration. Her current book project, Culture and the Persistence of Inequality, presents the colonial roots of educational inequality across religious groups in Africa, and the cultural factors that have allowed inequality to persist. She employs a variety of methods, ranging from field experiments to ethnography. The regional focus of her research is sub-Saharan Africa, where she has worked and conducted fieldwork in eight countries since 2005. She…