Assistant Professor of International Affairs
Megan Turnbull is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of International Affairs. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for International Trade and Security and the African Studies Institute. During Fall 2022, she was a Visiting Scholar with the Elections, Violence, and Parties Project at the University of Amsterdam. She was also a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School during 2021-2022.
Dr. Turnbull studies political order and violence with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Her book project, Political Order and Election Violence in Nigeria, explains the scale of election violence, paying close attention to how and why violence is jointly organized by politicians and different groups. In other work, she studies armed groups and their relationships with citizens and governments, election violence and political participation, community mobilization against electoral manipulation and violence, and democratic backsliding.
Her research has been published or is forthcoming in African Affairs, International Security, Political Science Quarterly, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Development. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University in 2017. She is an alumna of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Development, where she was a National Science Foundation-IGERT Doctoral Fellow.
