I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago, where I am affiliated with the political science department and the environment, agriculture and food working group. My current project concerns agriculture and food production in Russia and the US; the aim is to explain variation in the success and failure of alternatives to industrial agriculture. I am interested in particular in the linkages between industrial agriculture and its alternatives, for example, how government policies for commodity crops affect the success and failure of alternatives forms of agricultural production.

I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science in 2010 at the University of California Berkeley. My dissertation examines the political economy of newly created electricity markets in Russia, and more generally engages with questions how we study markets in the post-Soviet context and beyond. I have also done research and published on other aspects of the post-Soviet transformations - on welfare reforms and the politics of expertise. My articles appear in Economy and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, Russian Analytical Digest.

Contact: wengle <at> uchicago.edu

Phone: 510 501 1015