Political Science Faculty

Jennifer L. Erickson joined the Political Science Department and International Studies Program at Boston College in 2010. Her research interests include international security and arms control, conventional and nuclear weapons, and the laws and norms of war. Her current book project explores the historical and contemporary cases of new weapons technologies and the creation of new laws and norms of war. She has additional ongoing research projects dealing with sanctions and arms embargoes.

Her book, Dangerous Trade: Conventional Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation (Columbia, 2015), explains states' commitment to and compliance with new humanitarian arms trade norms, articulated in the UN Arms Trade Treaty and related multilateral initiatives. It is the winner of the APSA Foreign Policy Section's 2017 Best Book Award (for books published in 2015 and 2016) and has been reviewed in Perspectives on Politics, Humanity, and an H-Diplo International Security Studies Forum Roundtable (ISSF Roundtable 9-14). Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Peace Research, Political Science Quarterly, and International Studies Perspectives.

She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on international relations theory, global governance, globalization and national security, and EU foreign affairs.

Previously, Erickson was the inaugural holder of the White Family Sesquicentennial Assistant Professorship at Boston College. She has also been a Nuclear Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the United States and Europe, where she was a research fellow at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) and the Wissenschaftszentrum (WZB) in Berlin. She was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She has a B.A. in Political Science from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University.