Brooke Ackerly

Brooke Ackerly (Ph.D. Stanford University) is a Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include human rights, social and environmental justice, democratic theory, and feminist methodology for social science research. She integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism.

Her publications include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave 2010). Her current project follows an approach that she developed in Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism and Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, that is, to study an important question in political theory from the perspective of those in struggle. In Justice Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice, she explores the human rights violations hidden in the complexity of everyday life in a globalized world. This work highlights human rights violations related to economic, environmental, and gender injustice.

She teaches courses on feminist theory, feminist methods, human rights, contemporary political thought, and gender and the history of political thought. She is the winner of the Graduate Teaching Award and the Margaret Cuninggim Mentoring Prize.

She advises academics and donors on evaluation, methodology, and the ethics of research. She is the founder of the Global Feminisms Collaborative, a group of scholars and activists developing ways to collaborate on applied research for social justice. She serves the profession through committees in her professional associations including the American Political Science Association (APSA), International Studies Association (ISA), and the Association for Women’s Rights and Development. She is Co-Editor in Chief of The International Feminist Journal of Politics.