Amanda Murdie

Amanda Murdie is dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, Regents’ Professor, and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair. She joined the College from the University of Georgia, where she was head of the Department of International Affairs and Georgia Athletic Association Professor.

Murdie studies International Relations, specializing in the behavior of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and their interactions with states, local populations, and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Most of her work is in the areas of human security, human rights, conflict processes, and development. She has published more than 80 articles and book chapters in such journals as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and International Organization. Murdie has worked with both the policy and the NGO communities to develop new quantitative measures that capture the power of human security INGOs and track the spread of human security norms among non-state actors. Murdie also was previously a professor at Kansas State University and the University of Missouri.

Murdie was the 2023 recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association. This award “is presented annually to a scholar who is judged to have made (through a body of publications) the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research.” A recent article identified her as one of the top five most productive researchers in the cross-disciplinary field of human rights from 1990 to 2020 (Severo et al. 2021). From 2018 through 2022, she was Editor-in-Chief of International Studies Review. She also co-edited the University of Georgia Press Studies in Security and International Affairs Book Series.

Murdie was the 2011 winner of the William L. Stamey Award for Excellence in Teaching at Kansas State University. She has served on dozens of dissertation and thesis committees. Her students have gone on to faculty positions at many research and liberal arts colleges, including Murray State University, Georgia Southern, Rhodes College, and Emory University. They have also obtained jobs at many well-known think tanks, defense contractors, and NGOs, including the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND, and Doctors without Borders.