Monica Duffy Toft

Professor of International Politics, Director of the Center for Strategic Studies

Background

Before joining Fletcher, Monica taught at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. While at Harvard, she directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs and was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to this, she spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist.

Monica’s areas of research include international security, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and demography. In addition to several books, she has published numerous scholarly articles and editorials on civil wars, territory and nationalism, demography, and religion in global politics. In 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named Monica a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence, in 2012 she was named a Fulbright scholar, and most recently she served as the World Politics Fellow at Princeton University.

Monica was educated at the University of Chicago (M.A. and Ph.D. in political science) and at the University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A. in political science and Slavic languages and literature, summa cum laude).