Priscilla Torres

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Contact
Email:
pt104@wellesley.edu
Department
Political Science

  B.A., Loyola Marymount University M.A., Duke University Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow, Cornell University PhD., Duke University      

Professor Torres is an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College, where she will teach courses on international relations and global governance. Her research focuses on peacekeeping, peacebuilding and gender and international relations. Central to her research is the study of international initiatives and their implications for sub-national outcomes, whether that be conflict/peace or gender equality for example. Professor Torres’ work has previously been published in International Studies Quarterly and Populism. Her research has been funded by the United States Institute of Peace, by the Bradley Foundation and by the Department of Political Science at Duke University.

Her dissertation focuses on the effects of international peacebuilding on a multitude of local peace outcomes, conditional on community dispute resolution structures already in place. She relies on two original surveys, as well as community leader interviews and community histories from Liberia in the dissertation. She also has work that explores these same dynamics in Central Asia.

She was previously a pre-doctoral fellow at the Gender and Security Sector Lab at Cornell University where she worked on assessments of the barriers to women’s meaningful participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations for the Armed Forces of Liberia and the Norwegian Armed Forces.

Education

  • B.A., Loyola Marymount University
  • Ph.D., Duke University

Current and upcoming courses

Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and International Intervention

POL3396

How does the international community try to establish and maintain peace? This course explores the ways in which international actors try to establish and maintain peace. It focuses on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and international intervention more broadly. Throughout the course we will cover topics in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding fields such as what peace is, how conceptions of peace differ at the international versus the local level, by which avenues the international community tries to maintain peace, the conditions under which international peacekeeping and peacebuilding are effective, and the unintended consequences of international action. We will explore militarized and non-militarized international interventions, their development since the conception of peacekeeping and policy critiques against and in favor of international intervention as a means of maintaining peace. (PEAC 396 and POL3 396 are cross-listed courses.)