Rachel Beatty Riedl

Rachel Beatty Riedl is the Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Center on Global Democracy in the Brooks School of Public Policy, and a Professor in the Brooks School and Department of Government at Cornell University. 

Her research interests include institutions in democracies and autocracies, local governance and decentralization policy, authoritarian regime legacies and democratic resilience, and religion and politics, with a regional focus in Africa.  Previously, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University.  She has also been a visiting fellow at the Yale Program on Democracy, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a full member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as Chair of the Democracy and Autocracy section of the American Political Science Association.  Riedl is co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa, featuring weekly episodes of news highlights and interviews about life and politics on the African continent.  She holds a PhD from Princeton University.