Monica Duffy Toft is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Prior to Tufts, Toft was Professor of Government and Public Policy at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government for four years after having taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School for over a decade. She was educated at the University of Chicago (MA and PhD in political science) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA in political science and Slavic languages and literature, summa cum laude). Before college, she spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist. Professor Toft is a Global Scholar of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board and the Political Instability Task Force. The Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence. Most recently she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Norway and the World Politics Fellowship at Princeton University.

Professor Toft’s areas of research include: international security and foreign policy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and political demography. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly articles and policy pieces on global politics and international security, her most recent books include Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Oxford), Rethinking Religion in World Affairs (Oxford,), God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (Norton) and Securing the Peace (Princeton).