Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and director of Wesleyan’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, which she established in 2008. Chenoweth is currently an Associate Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Previously, she has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.

Chenoweth is an internationally-recognized authority on terrorism, nonviolent resistance, and counterterrorism. Her three books include Why Democracy Encourages Terrorism (under contract with Columbia University Press); Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan of the U.S. State Department; and Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT Press, 2010) with Adria Lawrence of Yale. The author of dozens of scholarly and popular articles, she hosts a blog called Rational Insurgent and is an occasional blogger at The Monkey Cage and Duck of Minerva.

At Wesleyan, Chenoweth teaches courses on international relations, terrorism, civil war, and contemporary warfare. She was honored as the 2010 recipient of the Carol Baker Memorial Prize for junior faculty excellence in teaching and research at Wesleyan.