Kinga Makovi

Kinga Makovi’s doctoral dissertation, “Social Structural Avenues for Mobilization – the Case of British Abolition,” has been awarded a 2014 National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. Kinga also received a de Karmen Fellowship in 2015. Her research takes a structural approach to understanding popular mobilization for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, applying tools from computational sociology and network analysis. Her thesis demonstrates that social relations both within and across communities were crucial for scaling up mobilization.

Biography

Kinga was born in Transylvania, and raised in Hungary. She received an MS in mathematical economics from Corvinus University of Budapest in 2010. At her alma mater she was one of the founding members of the Research Center for Educational and Network Studies. As part of her involvement with the Center Kinga helped conduct its first project, which went on to receive substantial funding from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Kinga’s interest in social networks next took her to Columbia University, where she is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, and a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow. She was also a teaching fellow at Harvard University where she worked with Christopher Winship. Currently she is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Research Interests

Kinga’s research leverages the tools of causal inference, and network analysis in order to solve historical puzzles. While her work is situated in several different time periods, the uniting focus is on elucidating the structural sources of collective action or diffusion.

Projects

Kinga's dissertation, entitled “Social Structural Avenues for Mobilization – the Case of British Abolition,” unpacks the popular anti-slavery movement at different levels of analysis. Using primary source documents — such as marriage records, contemporary maps, petitions, minute books and trade directories — Kinga reconstructs the petitioning campaign in Manchester, and throughout Britain. Kinga expects to apply the insights gleaned from her dissertation work to other instances of mobilization and diffusion, such as the Bread and Roses Strike in the United States and the diffusion of microfinance in contemporary India. Her previous projects include analyses of the co-investment network of slave traders and the lynching epidemic in the American South. In addition, as part of her interest in addressing challenges of causal inference, she has examined the effect of a child’s autism diagnosis on mothers’ subsequent childbearing behavior. Her work has been published in Sociological Science and Social Forces.

Selected Publications

  • Makovi, K., A. Winter, K.Y. Liu, and P. Bearman (2015) The Population Level Impacts of Differential Fertility Behavior of Parents of Children with Autism, Sociological Science. DOI 10.15195/v2.a19
  • Hagen, R., K. Makovi, and P. Bearman (2013) The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynch Mob Formation and Lethality, Social Forces, 92(2):757–787.
  • Erdi, P., K. Makovi, Z. Somogyvari, K. Strandburg, J. Tobochnik, P. Volf, and L. Zalanyi (2012) Prediction of Emerging Technologies Based on Analysis of the U.S. Patent Citation Network, Scientometrics, 95:225–242.