Shannon Drysdale Walsh is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and affiliate faculty at the Humphrey School. 

She was competitively awarded an endowed McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2014-2016) through the University of Minnesota. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Political Science (summer and fall 2015), and a residential research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota (fall 2012 and fall 2021). 

Her published work explains variation in state response to violence against women focusing on Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Her research analyzes how countries with few resources and longstanding patterns of discrimination against women make institutional advances that facilitate the implementation of laws addressing domestic violence, rape, and femicide (killings of women). 

In addition, she produces scholarship on women’s policymaking, Central American migration and immigration, sex trafficking in the United States, and crime in Latin America. She has engaged in advocacy work in rural Guatemala and served as a consultant and expert witness for asylum cases in the United States. 

She has published her work in journals including Current Sociology; Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Law & Social Inquiry; Human Rights Review; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Latin American Politics and Society, and Latin American Research Review. Her research has been awarded competitive external funding from several sources, including the American Association of University Women, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, American Political Science Association, and Fulbright-Hays.

Shannon Drysdale Walsh holds a PhD and MA from the University of Notre Dame, and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.