Global Fellow
Assistant professor of Government at the College of William & Mary
Fiona is an assistant professor of Government at the College of William & Mary. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, University of Michigan. She her PhD and MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in economics from Vassar College.
Her research examines autocratic politics through a judicial lens, focusing on the role that courts play in autocratic survival. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines why, how, and when autocrats turn to courts to repress political rivals and the implications of these decisions on law and order and judicial development. Her research leverages a combination of archival research, elite interviews, and computational text analysis to examine the political dimensions of law and courts in developing contexts. This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.