not in residence

dkcohen@umn.edu

Research Interests
The politics of national security and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; how security issues have affected Congressional elections in the past thirty years.

Dara Kay Cohen is an assistant professor in the global policy area at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD from Stanford's Department of Political Science. Previously she was a 2008-09 Zukerman Fellow and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC, the Teaching Assistant for CISAC's Honors Program and a 2008-09 Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellow at the United States Institute for Peace. Her dissertation, "Explaining Sexual Violence During Civil War," studies how rape was used during civil wars between 1980-99. She has completed seven months of fieldwork in Sierra Leone and East Timor, where she interviewed more than 200 ex-combatants and noncombatants. She is a 2007-2008 recipient of the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Dara's previous research focused on the politics of homeland security, and the escalation of international military crises. Her research has appeared in the Stanford Law Review and International Security.

Dara graduated with honors with an AB in Political Science and Philosophy from Brown University in 2001, and served as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001-2003.