Faculty

Boone, Catherine
Professor

Office: BAT 3.128
Phone: 512-232-7249
cboone@austin.utexas.edu

Education: Professor Boone received her B.A. from the University of California at San Diego and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Research interests:
Professor Boone specializes in comparative politics, with an emphasis on theories of political economy and economic development. She has conducted research on industrial, commercial, and land tenure policies in West Africa, where her work has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the World Bank, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her current research focuses on territorial politics and rural property rights in contemporary Africa. Prof. Boone has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), well as of review boards for the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Panel of the Social Science Research Council and is Secretary of the African Politics Conference Group, an APSA-affiliated research network. In 2005, she was elected to the Executive Council of the American Political Science Assocation for a 2005-8 term. Prof. Boone is also President of the West Africa Research Association (2005-8), which overseas the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal.

Field(s) of Study: Comparative Politics; Political Economy

Awards/Honors:
She has been Visiting Fulbright Professor, Beijing Foreign Studies University, People's Republic of China; Visiting Professor and Researcher, Centro de Investigacion y Docencias Economicas (CIDE), Mexico City, Mexico; Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Centre Ivoirien de Recherche Economique et Sociale, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire; and Visiting Researcher at the Centre Des Etudes Superieures en Gestion, Dakar, Senegal.

Recent Publications:
She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930 -1985 (Cambridge, 1992), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 1993, and Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 2004, a runner-up for the Leubbert Award in 2004, and winner of the Society for Comparative Research Mattei Dogan Award in 2005. She is also the author of of articles and reviews appearing in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Development Studies, World Development, African Economic History, Africa Today, American Anthropologist, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, and the Journal of Modern African Studies, and several book chapters.