Melina Platas

About

Melina Platas is an associate professor of political science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on political accountability, the politics of service delivery, and the role of identity and culture in shaping economic and political outcomes, with a regional focus in sub-Saharan Africa.

Platas has worked and conducted fieldwork for nearly two decades in Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, and Malawi. Her forthcoming book, Culture and Mass Schooling: The Colonial Roots of Educational Inequality in Africa (under contract at Cambridge University Press), employs a mixed-methods strategy to identify the historical roots of a widespread Muslim-Christian schooling gap in Africa, and to develop a cultural theory for why inequality in education persists. Her ongoing research focuses on climate and the environment, particularly air pollution in African cities, and on economic development and political change in Africa in the twenty-first century.

Her work has been published in a variety of academic journals, including the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.

Melina was a Fulbright scholar in Uganda in 2008–9 and holds a PhD in political science and BA in human biology from Stanford University.