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William Christiansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of political science with a focus on international relations. Before joining Mount St. Mary's, he worked as a full-time instructor in Virginia Commonwealth University's Political Science Department while completing his dissertation at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Political Science. In addition to teaching at VCU, he taught international relations and comparative politics classes at the University of South Carolina from 2013 to 2019.
Christiansen's dissertation, International Conflict, Political Leaders, and Accountability researches how leaders are evaluated for their actions during international conflicts and the biographical determinants of a political leader's lethality in international disputes. A paper from another project, “Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Local Origin of Democracy Promotion," was recently published in the journal "International Interactions". His methodological approach involves the use of experiments and computational statistics to generate inferences about the behavior of political leaders and audiences. Before working toward his doctorate at South Carolina, Christiansen earned a B.A. in philosophy and a B.A./M.A. in political science at Virginia Tech.
Christiansen, William T., Peterson, Timothy and Heinrich, Tobias (2019). Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Local Origin of Support for US Democracy Promotion. International Interactions 45 (4), 585–616.
Learn more about William Christiansen, Ph.D., at https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/williamchristiansen.