Former Kellogg PhD Fellow Laura Gamboa came to the University of Notre Dame in 2010 to earn a doctorate in political science. This year, she joins the faculty of the Keough School of Global Affairs as assistant professor of democracy and global affairs.
This new position is one of two junior faculty positions created in partnership with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies as part of the Institute’s efforts supporting both the University’s new Democracy Initiative and the Keough School’s research program in Democracy, Governance, Institutions, and Rights outlined in its Strategic Plan 2030.
“We are very excited about Laura’s return to Notre Dame,” states Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Director of the Kellogg Institute. “Her work has inaugurated a new research agenda, focusing on how democratic oppositions should confront anti-democratic incumbents. She is addressing the question of democratic backsliding, one of the great problems of our time and a focus of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative, guided by sound normative principles and rigorous empirical research.”
Gamboa became actively involved with the Kellogg Institute from the moment she came to Notre Dame, including regular participation in the Comparative Politics Workshop and weekly Kellogg lecture series talks. She remained closely connected through her final year, when she won a competitive Kellogg Institute Dissertation Year Fellowship to complete her dissertation, “Opposition at the Margins: The Erosion of Democracy in Latin America,” which earned the 2017 Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Award in Social Sciences.
After graduating with a PhD in political science, Gamboa joined the faculty of Utah State University as assistant professor of political science in 2016. She was recruited by the University of Utah in 2020, and she was a Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University in 2023-24. Gamboa has taught courses in research methods, global issues, Latin American politics, and democratic erosion, among others, including a graduate seminar on theory in comparative politics.
Gamboa’s research has focused on institutions, regime, and regime change in Latin America, and her broader interests include party politics, voting behavior, research design, quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Her 2022 book Resisting Backsliding: Opposition Strategies against the Erosion of Democracy (Cambridge University Press) received the 2022 Donna Lee Van Cott Award for best book in political institutions from the Latin American Studies Association and an honorable mention for the 2023 Luebbert Book Award for best book in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association. Gamboa’s research also has been published in journals such as Comparative Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Elections and Public Opinion.
In addition to her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, Gamboa holds an MA in Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA with honors in history from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
“I am thrilled to be back home,” shares Gamboa. “I cannot think of a better place or community to study and work towards the improvement and protection of democracy.”
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the globe that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds partnerships throughout the world on the themes of global democracy and integral human development.