**re-posted on behalf of Benjamin J. Newman and Yamil R. Velez**

We are pleased to announce the launch of Political Identities Research Group (PIRG), a research group based in the New York City metro area, and Northeast more broadly, interested in the study of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality in American politics and comparative contexts.

You can visit our website here: http://www.pirgnyc.org/

Upon visiting our website, you can learn about our group and upcoming meetings, view a list of our Faculty Affiliates at NYC-area universities, and join our Mailing List.

The vision of PIRG is to bring together researchers in Political Science, as well as other disciplines (e.g., Sociology, Criminal Justice, Economics, Psychology), for ongoing meetings showcasing new research in key political science sub-fields related to groups and identity, such as Race and Ethnic Politics, Class and Income Inequality, Women and Politics, Religion and Politics, Sexuality and Politics, and the intersection of these areas.

As a newly organized research group, our goal is to hold three one-day long meetings per academic year with one meeting in the fall, one meeting in the spring, and another meeting in summer. Each meeting will span the course of an entire day, and will be broken into three segments, with the first segment of each meeting consisting of short research presentations (15-20 minutes each), the second segment consisting of methods-oriented workshops focused on helping identity scholars enhance their research through the use of new methodological tools and techniques, and the third involving a break-out session for the purpose of incubating new research ideas and collaboration.


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** INAUGURAL MEETING AND CALL FOR PROPOSALS **
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We are pleased to announce that our first meeting will be on Thursday, May 28th, 2015 at the University of Connecticut regional campus in Stamford, CT. This meeting will be from 10am to 4pm, after which we will break to The Cask Republic (http://caskrepublic.com/) for drinks and socializing. At this time, we would like to announce a call for proposals for our inaugural meeting. We are interested in receiving proposals in any of our topic areas of interest. Additionally, we are interested in receiving proposals for our methods workshop; such proposals should discuss the method to be presented, as well as how it might assist identity politics scholars in their research. We invite workshop proposals covering topics ranging from experimental methods, causal inference, mediation analysis, text analysis, regression discontinuity designs, multi-level regression and post-stratification, etc. For full consideration, proposals must be submitted by April 15, 2015.

Please RSVP so we can get a head count for the meeting room and food order.

You can RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/wfYujTtLyC

You can submit your proposal here: http://goo.gl/forms/e6AcO7p1Ix

As we build steam, we would very much like bring as many scholars in the NYC metropolitan area and Northeast on board with us. We would like to invite you to join our Mailing List and participate in our meetings. Further, if you have any colleagues, including graduate students, that you believe would be interested in our research group, it would be a great help to us if you forwarded this information along to them!

Yours,

Benjamin J. Newman, University of Connecticut

Yamil R. Velez, Stony Brook University (Wesleyan University Fall 2015)