Ashlyn Hand

Ashlyn Hand joined SMU's Center for Presidential History in the fall of 2022. Her current project, entitled Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Policy Choices (1993-2017) compares the varied approaches to promoting freedom of conscience abroad during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Prioritizing Faith shows how evolving bureaucratic dynamics, agenda-setting processes, and strategic shifts at the presidential level interact and change U.S. policy.

Ashlyn received her Ph.D. from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 where she was a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. Prior to joining the team at CPH, she was a fellow with the America in the World Consortium, completing a pre-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins SAIS (2020-2021) and a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University (2021-2022). Ashlyn’s work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Church and State and Foreign Policy.