Avital Livny

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, previously a Junior Research Fellow at the Carlos III-Juan March Institute in Madrid. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford and an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford.

My first book, published with Cambridge University Press in 2020, is entitled Trust and the Islamic Advantage: Religious-Based Movements in Turkey and the Muslim World. It was named a 2022 Best Book by the APSA Middle East and North Africa Section. Purchase a copy directly from CUP or through Amazon.

Since 2018, I have been the principal investigator of an NSF-funded project, "Improving and Integrating Global Diversity Estimates Using Transparent Methods." I spent AY 2019-2020 as a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society (IRES) at Chapman University. Previously, I spent AY 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 as a Linowes Faculty Fellow at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and AY 2018-2019 as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois.  I am also the Director of the "Doing Diversity Science" summer research program through the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Illinois.

A copy of my CV is available here. You can reach me via email and on Bluesky.