Bernardo Zacka ’05

Political scientist Bernardo Zacka ’05 is an Associate Professor at MIT. His work examines how the state is experienced by those who interact with it and those who act in its name. His scholarship centers a form of political theory practiced with an ethnographic sensibility, in which careful description of real places and practices becomes the ground for critique and normative argument. Bernardo’s first book, “When the State Meets the Street,” probes the everyday moral life of street-level bureaucrats. His second book, “Before a Word Is Spoken,” examines what difference architecture and interior design can make at the interface between state and society. Bernardo has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Zacka earned a PhD and an MA from Harvard and holds an SB in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.