Ashley McIlvain Moran

Research Scientist & Lecturer, Department of Government

Ashley McIlvain Moran is a research scientist and lecturer in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Government and research director for the Comparative Constitutions Project. She co-directs (with Zachary Elkins) UT’s Embedded Scholars Program and co-directs (with Zachary Elkins and Roy Gardner) an NSF-funded research project on Concept Integration in Comparative Law. She is a distinguished scholar at UT’s Strauss Center for International Security and Law where she previously directed the Center’s state fragility initiative, led its interdisciplinary research programs funded by the U.S. Defense Department and USAID Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, and taught on fragile states at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Overseas, she previously worked as parliamentary advisor in Georgia for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), ran democratic reform programs and trainings in Azerbaijan and Iraq for NDI, and designed rule of law programs in Kyrgyzstan for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Ashley’s research and teaching focus on constitutional development in divided societies, court elaboration of new constitutions, and democracy in difficult contexts. Her current book manuscript focuses on the impact of the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court on constitutional elaboration and social cohesion in Iraq. She served on NDI’s Democracy Assistance in Transition working group and is currently a board member for the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), security fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and member of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change. She received a MALD in comparative law and development economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and BAs in government and sociology and a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin.