Nonresident Fellow

Nora Webb Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Political Science PhD from the University of Washington and a dual Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. Her research addresses economic resilience and the long-term impacts of colonialism on social trust, with a regional focus on the former Soviet Union. She also writes about the impact of social media and images on protest mobilization, examining diverse cases such as the 2010 revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Her primary methodological interest is in images as data for social science research, with related interests in machine learning, text as data, and causal inference. Notable experiences outside of the university setting include serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan and Liberia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Cambridge Elements series in Quantitative and Computational Methods for the Social Sciences, Policy Studies JournalPolitical Research Quarterly, and Europe-Asia Studies, among other outlets.