Katherine irajpanah

Welcome!

I am a political scientist studying international conflict and U.S. foreign policy. During the 2025-26 academic year, I am a Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. I will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University in July 2026. 

My book project—Social Theory of Military Strategy—examines the impact of warfighting norms on military strategy and conflict outcomes. I investigate these relationships through discourse analysis of strategic and legal texts, historical case studies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and macro-level statistical analysis of cross-national conflict data between 1800 and 2022. 

In other research, I consider the implications of my findings for learning in counterinsurgency and intelligence assessments. My co-authored work—on post-1945 norms and the disappearance of war declarations—is featured in Security Studies. I have brought my international relations perspective to the study of presidential power, as well, in an article on unilateral military action, available at Presidential Studies Quarterly. 

Previously, I was an International Security Program Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Minerva-USIP Peace and Security Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and a Hans J. Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center. 

I graduated with a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in May 2025 and a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University in June 2019. I am originally from Santa Monica, California.