Rachel Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Political Science, History & Political Science

Rachel A. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Otterbein University. Her research focuses on the legacies of armed conflict, state building, corruption, and human rights in Central America. Dr. Schwartz’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), and her work has been published or is forthcoming in scholarly journals like the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Global Security Studies, Latin American Politics & Society, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Military in Politics, and Studies in Comparative International Development. She has also contributed to a number of popular outlets including The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, NACLA Report on the Americas, Americas Quarterly, and World Politics Review.
Her current book project, provisionally titled Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America, was awarded the 2020 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Dr. Schwartz began conducting research in Central America as an undergraduate at Haverford College and continued her engagement with the region as a program associate at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C. based think tank, where she coordinated programs on security and migration in Central America and Mexico as well as Congressional outreach. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. Prior to beginning at Otterbein University, Dr. Schwartz was a 2019-2020 postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University.
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