Senior Lecturer in Political Science

Overview

Nina Tannenwald is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on the role of international institutions, norms and ideas in global security issues, efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, and human rights and the laws of war. Her book, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), won the 2009 Lepgold Prize for best book in international relations.  

Her current research projects include the future of the nuclear normative order, and compliance with, and effectiveness of, the laws of war. She has co-edited, with Matthew Evangelista, Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? (Oxford, 2017). Her articles have appeared in International Organization, International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Ethics and International Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and the Washington Quarterly, among others.

From January-June 2023 she was Fulbright Visiting Professor of International Studies at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. She has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities, a Carnegie Scholar, and an MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Fellow in International Peace and Security. In 2012-2013 she served as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation in the U.S. State Department.

In 2019 she completed her second term as Director of the International Relations Program at Brown. She was previously assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Joukowsky Family Assistant Research Professor and then associate research professor at the Watson Institute. She holds a master's degree from the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and a Ph.D in international relations from Cornell University.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas