Allison Hartnett

Allison Hartnett is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California, with joint affiliation in Middle East Studies. During the 2024–2025 academic year, she serves as a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford (2019) and an MPhil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2013), alongside a BA from Boston University (2009). Prior to USC, she held postdoctoral positions at Yale University’s Leitner Program on Political Economy and Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.

Research Interests: Her work focuses on comparative and historical political economy, examining inequality, colonial legacies, rural politics, and state formation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Her book project analyzes redistributive conflict and land reform in MENA autocracies, supported by grants from organizations like the American Center for Oriental Research. She has also developed major datasets including the MENA Land Reform Database and the MENAHDA historical data archive.

Recent Work: Her research explores colonial legacies of state development, coercive institutions, and authoritarian durability. Key articles include analyses of precolonial elite dynamics and colonial power redistribution, published in the American Political Science Review, as well as work on pandemic governance in Nature: Human Behaviour.

Awards & Grants: Recipient of the 2017 Oxford University Student Union’s Best Postgraduate Teacher Award. Her research has been supported by the American Center for Oriental Research, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Centre for British Research in the Levant.

Teaching: Taught courses on Middle East political economy, authoritarian politics, and research methodology at Yale, Oxford, and the British Institute in Amman. Supervised theses on MENA politics and co-leads a dataset project on coercive institutions with Prof. Elizabeth Nugent and Dr. Nicholas Lotito.