Marisa Kellam

Marisa Kellam is an associate professor of political science at Waseda University. She researches the quality of democracy in Latin America. Her research links institutional analysis to various governance outcomes in democracies along three lines of inquiry: political parties and coalitional politics; mass electoral behavior and party system change; and democratic accountability and media freedom. She has published her research in various peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics and Democratization.  For 2021-2023, she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Marisa Kellam teaches international and Japanese students in the English-based degree programs of Waseda’s School of Political Science & Economics. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, she spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. She moved to Tokyo in 2013 with her Japanese husband and two children. Dedicated to her academic career and family, she engages daily in the pursuit of work-life balance.