Alisa Moldavanova promoted to associate professor
Congratulations to Dr. Moldavanova on her superb research record and well-deserved tenure and promotion!
Alisa Moldavanova, Ph.D., joined the Department of Political Science in August 2013 as an assistant professor. She is the product of a superb graduate program at the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Moldavanova has publishedsix articles in refereed journals; eight chapters in edited collections; co-edited a special issue of Critical Sociology; and co-edited The Nonprofit Sector in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia: Civil Society Advances and Challenges. Four of her six refereed articles are published in the most highly ranked journals in her field: The American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Urban Affairs, Public Management Review, and Administration & Society. Moldavanova received the 2015 Paul A. Volker Public Service Award from the American Political Science Association and received a research grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2016.
That same year, she received the Wilder School Award for Exemplary Scholarship in Social Equity and Public Policy Analysis. She is an executive committee member of the Public Administration Research Section of the American Society for Public Administration and the Theories, Issues, and Boundaries section of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. She is a cofounder and facilitator of the Sustainability Scholars Forum at Wayne State.
Moldavanova's research has been conducted on a variety of U.S. and foreign-based cultural organizations. A number of her studies focus on museums to illustrate the dynamic relationship that exists between two distinct narratives of intergenerational sustainability - institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness. Her findings show that, in sustainable organizations, the tensions between these narratives are reconciled via sustainable management practices. Another work examines the social, political and demographic sources of variation in creative cultural capital in more than 3,100 U.S. counties, with results indicating that cultural industries are likely to thrive in communities that rely on different forms of social and religious capital as well as the presence of certain types of political culture legacy.
This study links sustainability with intergenerational social equity and develops the notion of a socially responsible organization for the public and nonprofit sectors. Among her book chapters, Moldavanova contributed a piece titled "Sustainability Research in U.S. Public Administration: Pillar Tensions and Synergies," which appears in The Handbook of American Public Administration (George Frederickson and Edward Stazyk, eds., MA: Edward Elgar, 2018). This chapter is based on a systematic review of sustainability research published in the top 10 public administration and policy journals during the past quarter-century. It discusses the major themes established in public administration sustainability research as well as the theoretical developments and empirical contributions that have emerged from this body of work. That a junior scholar such as Moldavanova was selected to write a chapter for a compendium of this nature speaks to both her reputation and stature in her field.