Jaimie Bleck is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in African politics with a focus on education, participation, civil society, and citizenship. Her first book, Education and Empowered Citizenship in Mali, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. She and Nicolas van de Walle published, Continuity in Change: Electoral Politics in Africa 1990-2015, with Cambridge University Press in 2018. Her work appears in journals including Governance, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Comparative Political Studies, African Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, PS, World Development, and Democratization. Her research has been funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, USAID-DRG, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She completed her PhD at the Department of Government at Cornell University and received her BA from the University of Chicago.
She spent 2014-2015 on sabbatical in Mali researching informal, tea-drinking discussion groups (grinw). She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, Talking with Youth about Governance: Social Clubs and Social Capital in Mali.Professor Bleck is also a concurrent faculty member in the Keough School of Global Affairs, Senior Research Advisor with the The Ford Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity, Faculty Fellow with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and Faculty Affiliate with Notre Dame Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (ND PIER).
