American Council of Learned Societies Awards Professor Stephen Crowley Post-Doctoral Fellowship

Can the European social model survive the expansion of the European Union (EU) to 10 post-communist countries?

That is the question Oberlin Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Crowley hopes to answer by conducting an in-depth study of Romania and Bulgaria, “two countries at the extreme of the coordinated/ liberal spectrum,” Crowley says.

In support of Crowley’s research project—East European Labor, Varieties of Capitalism, and the Future of the European Social Model—the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded him a fellowship for post-doctoral research in Southeast European Studies.

A specialist on politics in Russia and Eastern Europe, Crowley is one of four scholars in the U.S. chosen to receive ACLS post-doctoral fellowships in Southeast European Studies. The individual award, an amount up to $25,000, will support research for 6 to 12 consecutive months. He will pursue his research this coming academic year while a research fellow at the Collegium Budapest/Institute of Advanced Study in Hungary.

 “In post-communist societies, the rigid and highly centralized labor markets of the communist period in little more than a decade have been transformed into labor markets that look less like those in continental Europe than those found in liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom,” he states.

“While European Union expansion is said to entail the harmonization of the new entrants with existing EU standards, this more liberal post-communist labor regime has considerable potential to weaken the European social model.”

In addition to the ACLS fellowship, Crowley has received support for this project from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He also was recently awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in East European Studies at the University of Warsaw, but had to decline in order to take the fellowship in Budapest.

Crowley, who joined the Oberlin faculty in 1995, received a B.A. at Hamilton College and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. His publications focus on workers’ political consciousness and movements, attempting to explain why labor is very radical in some sectors, but quiescent in others. His teaching and research also address the question of general social movements.
The ACLS is a private nonprofit federation of 69 national scholarly organizations, whose mission is “the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies.” The Southeast European Studies program is supported by funding from the US Department of State under the Research and Training for Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union Act of 1983, Title VIII. This year ACLS awarded fellowships totaling $8,382,491.

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