Michael L. Ross

Michael Lewin Ross (* 1961 ) is an American political scientist . Since 2009 he has held a professorship in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles . In his research, he primarily deals with the political and economic problems of countries that have a large amount of natural resources (“ resource curse ”), especially oil .

Career

Ross began studying political science at the University of California, Santa Cruz , where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984 . Building on this, he continued his studies at Princeton University , which he completed in 1992 with a Master of Arts . Michael L. Ross received the Jacob K. Javits Scholarship from the US Department of Education during his master’s degree and later as a PhD student . In 1993 he was a visiting scholar at Yale University in New Haven (Connecticut) and in 1994 at Malaya University in Kuala Lumpur . In 1996 Ross received his doctorate in Princeton with his thesis The Political Economy of Boom-and-Bust Logging in Indonesia, the Philippines, and East Malaysia 1950–1994 .

Subsequently, Ross received a position as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1996 . At the invitation of Paul Collier , from January to December 2000 he was a visiting scholar at the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank in Washington, DC and Jakarta . In 2001 he moved to the University of California in Los Angeles , initially also as a junior professor . In the same year his book Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown was published in Southeast Asia , which was reprinted in 2012 and translated into Japanese in 2013.

In 2004 he was appointed Associate Professor in the Political Science Department of the University of California . In 2009 Ross was appointed professor there. From 2007 to 2013 he was also director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the university .

His 2012 book The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations was named one of the year's Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice magazine . Translations of the book have appeared in Russian, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese. In addition, excerpts were reprinted in the fifth edition of Essential Readings in World Politics by Karen A. Mingst and Jack L. Snyder .

Since 2013 Ross has been on the editorial board of World Politics and Comparative Political Studies .

Works

• Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia . Cambridge University Press, New York 2001.
• The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012.

Web links

• Homepage on the website of the University of California, Los Angeles (with curriculum vitae)
• Literature by and about Michael L. Ross in the catalog of the German National Library