Catherine Boone, University of Texas at Austin
Council Member

Catherine Boone is Associate Professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin.  She received her BA in Political Science with a minor in Economics at University of California, San Diego, and her Ph.D in Political Science from MIT.  Boone's research lies in the areas of Comparative Politics and Political Economy, and focuses on questions of state formation and economic change in the late-developing world. Her work on Africa has dealt with the substantive problems of regime consolidation, economic liberalization, struggles over land tenure, and the politics of HIV/AIDS.  She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (Cambridge, 1992), which was a finalist for the African Studies Association's Herskovitz book award, and Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), which won the Mattei Dogan Award from the Society for Comparative Research.  Her articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, the African Studies Review, and other comparative politics venues.

She has held appointments as Fulbright professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, visiting professor at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, Fulbright researcher at the Centre Ivoirien de Recherche Economique et Sociale in Cote d'Ivoire, and researcher at the Ecole Superieure de Gestion des Entreprises (ESGE) in Dakar, Senegal.  She was a fellow of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies from 1990-1992.

She has contributed to APSA by serving on various committees of the Comparative Politics Section, and as an officer of the African Politics Conference Group, an APSA-related group.  She is currently serving as President of the West Africa Research Association, which directs the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, and as a member of the SSRC's Africa Regional Advisory Panel.