Profile
Sarah Gray Knoesen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the politics of economic development and democratic institutions in the context of developing countries in Africa. Sarah's dissertation analyzes the political logic of fiscal distribution in South Africa, examining distributive decisions made by the central government, to determine how the African National Congress maintains its political dominance in South Africa. Sarah is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of African Political Economy in the Political Science Department at UC San Diego. She is also a research scholar at the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego. Sarah is an active member of the Women in Political Science Program at UC San Diego. She has previously served three terms as co-director of this program, during which time she helped the program to develop into a sustainable networking and mentoring organization for all female graduate students in the department. She also served two terms as the Vice President of Social Programming of the Department of Political Science Graduate Student Council during which she organized six department-wide social events.
