Gautam Nair and Akshay Dixit Win MPSA Awards

Congratulations to Stone Program faculty affiliate Gautam Nair and recent Stone PhD Scholar graduate Akshay Dixit, who have won more awards for their paper "Caste Reparations: Economic Advance, Social Concord, and Policy Backlash." They have received the Paula D. McClain Award for the best paper presented at the annual MPSA conference, and the Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for the best paper in comparative politics. The paper was also an honorable mention for the Robert H. Durr Award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem. 

The research for this paper was supported by a Stone Research Grant from the Stone Program. The paper previously won the Best Paper on Economic and Social Inequality prize from the American Political Science Association's Class and Inequality Section.

Gautam Nair is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a scholar of inequality, distribution, and democracy, with a focus on the politics of social policy, state-business relations, and South Asia. He received his PhD in political science with distinction in from Yale University. Akshay Dixit is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He will join Dartmouth College as an Assistant Professor of Government after the postdoctoral fellowship. He received his PhD in Political Economy & Government from Harvard University, where he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (2024-25), a Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality & Wealth Concentration, and a Democracy Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance & Innovation (2023-24).