Elisabeth Jean Wood
American political scientist

Elisabeth Jean Wood is an American political scientist, currently the Franklin Muzzy Crosby Professor of the Human Environment, professor of political science, and professor of international and area studies at Yale University. She studies sexual violence during war, the emergence of political insurgencies and individuals' participation in them, and democratization, with a focus on Latin American politics and African politics.
Education and early career
Wood received a BA in physics from Cornell University in 1979, and then another BA in philosophy and mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1981. She then received a MA in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by an MA in Latin American Studies in 1988, also from UC Berkeley. She completed her education in 1995, receiving a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
Upon completing her PhD, Wood became a professor in the department of politics at New York University. She remained a professor in that department until 2004, when she moved to Yale University. During this time she also began a professorship at the Santa Fe Institute in 2002 which she held until 2010. From 2010 to 2017, she was a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
Career
In 2000, Wood published her first book, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q81863200. VIAF identifies the subject as 50459229. The Library of Congress control number is n00085387. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1981, 1988 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elisabeth Jean Wood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.