Berkley Center

Karrie J. Koesel is an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. She previously taught at the University of Oregon. Koesel's expertise is in contemporary Chinese and Russian politics, authoritarianism, and religion and politics. She is the author of Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences (2014), and her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, The China Quarterly, and Post-Soviet Affairs, among others. She has received grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright program, International Research & Exchanges Board, Einaudi Center and East Asia Program at Cornell University, and the University of Oregon. Koesel was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. In 2009, she earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University and won the 2010 American Political Science Association Aaron Wildavsky Award for the best dissertation on religion and politics; she earned her M.A. from the University of Notre Dame and B.A. from Drake University.