Provisional Sinn Fein, 1985, Falls Rd. Belfast. © Peter Moloney

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I am a currently a non-resident Fellow with the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point. 

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I received my Ph.D and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Washington. I completed my B.A. in Political Science and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of Wooster.

I specialize in the study of political violence. I am specifically interested the relationships between violent actors' gender dynamics and legitimacy, public engagement, and accountability for human rights violations. I interrogate how women’s involvement - as participants or civilians - affects rebel and state behavior, reputation, and outcomes. I am relatedly interested in militant visuals: my current projects in this vein include analyses of women in rebel posters, cross-national visual propaganda, and gender in militia and right-wing iconography. My book project, Rebel Women: Violence and Legitimacy in Civil War, leverages original data on women's participation in front-line and auxiliary roles in 150 rebel organizations, a novel database of over 2800 militant-produced images, and analyses of conflict-related prosecutions and truth and reconciliation commission reports to explore how women's involvement in rebellion shapes perceptions of violence and conflict outcomes.

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My research is published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, European Journal of International Security,  and Security Dialogue, as well as in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, Political Violence @ A Glance, and other outlets.