Dr. Margarita Estévez-Abe is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs and the Co-Director of the Center for European Studies at Syracuse University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Keio University, and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. Her research interests include comparative political economy of advanced industrial countries, the varieties of capitalism and welfare states, gender equality, and contemporary Japanese politics. She is the author of Welfare Capitalism in Postwar Japan (Cambridge Series on Comparative Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. Her articles have been published in numerous journals, including World Politics, Social Politics, Asian Survey, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Social Policy and Administration, and Social Science Japan Journal, as well as chapters in edited volumes.

Professor Estévez-Abe has taught at the University of Minnesota and Harvard University, and has also held visiting professorships at the University of Konstanz, University of Duisburg-Essen, and University of Tokyo. She was an Advanced Research Fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and her stay as the Visiting Senior Fellow in the fall semester is supported by a grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership (CGP). She's currently working on a book manuscript, entitled The Transformation of Familialist States in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain.