Biography
Ashlyn Hand is a 2021-2022 postdoctoral fellow at Duke University’s Department of Political Science. At Duke, she is affiliated with the Program in American Grand Strategy and the America in the World Consortium.
She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin in where she was a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Ashlyn served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
A mixed-methods researcher, Ashlyn’s book project entitled Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Policy Choices (1993-2017) compares the varied approaches to promoting freedom of conscience abroad during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. Prioritizing Faith shows how evolving bureaucratic dynamics, agenda-setting processes, and strategic shifts at the presidential level interact and change U.S. policy.
Her broader research interests include strategic decision-making in U.S. foreign policy, religion’s influence on conflict and peacebuilding, the intersection of human rights and security, agenda-setting, bureaucratic politics, and policy durability.