Biography
Ashlyn Hand is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her first book Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy will be published by New York University Press in the summer of 2025. She has also been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Church and State, and Foreign Policy.
In March 2024, Ashlyn co-founded Whalen Hand Consulting LLC, a consultancy focused on delivering historically grounded insights to guide U.S. foreign policy and aid organizations in planning for the future.
She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin where she was a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. Before coming to SMU, Ashlyn was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University’s Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS.