FIONA SHEN-BAYH
Assistant Professor of Government and Data Science
William & Mary
fshenbayh[at]wm.edu

I am an Assistant Professor of Government at William & Mary where I also serve as a faculty affiliate of the Global Research Institute and the Data Science program. Additionally, I am a research affiliate of the Centre on Law and Social Transformations at the University of Bergen.

I study the politics of authoritarian regimes, specifically the legal and judicial instruments of power. My book project Undue Process examines these themes in the context of postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa and is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series.

In other works, I examine the challenges of promoting access to equitable justice and the legacies of autocratic rule. As co-founder and co-director of the Digital Inclusion and Governance Lab, my research draws  on a variety of digital tools and data to analyze the political economy of development  in the Global South.

​My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of International Studies, and the Global Research Institute. My research has been published in World Politics and is forthcoming at the American Political Science Review.

I earned my PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and my BA in Economics from Vassar College. Previously, I was a Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.