I am an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the political science department at the University of Michigan. Prior to this position, I was an LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
I study comparative politics and political behavior, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, I am interested in the challenges of democratization efforts in post-conflict settings and weakly institutionalized democracies. My book project examines the role of civil society organizations in fostering democratization after civil war.
My research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation; the National Science Foundation; the Research Council of Norway (FRIPRO); the West Africa Research Association; the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley; and the Center for African Studies, the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, and the Institute for International Studies at UC Berkeley. My work has been featured on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and published in African Affairs, Party Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, and the South African Geographical Journal.
At the University of Michigan, I am an associate at the African Studies Center and a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies. I am a member of Evidence and Governance in Politics, a research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development, a co-coordinator of the Midwest Workshop in Empirical Political Science, a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow, and an APSA Diversity Fellow. I am part of the inaugural cohort at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences’ Institute at Stanford University on "Diversity: Why and How Difference Makes a Difference" to be held in 2023.
Prior to obtaining my Ph.D., I completed a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in Côte d’Ivoire. I hold a dual-language Master's degree in International Affairs, Conflict Resolution and Civil Society Development from the American University of Paris and the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Originally from North Carolina, I graduated from Elon University with a Bachelor's degree in International Studies, African concentration.
Overall, I have experience living and working in France, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal, and I have also conducted fieldwork in Zambia.
I can be reached at jumdavis [at] umich.edu