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 work has been published in World Politics.

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.