FarzanehHall, Room 315
Email: nwletsa@ou.edu
Natalie Wenzell Letsa, Ph.D., is a political scientist and the Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is also the directing member of the Executive Committee of OU's African Studies Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University in 2017. She studies public opinion and political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa. While her primary focus is on the politics of autocratic regimes, her new work explores the effects of the historical legacies of colonial rule on contemporary political beliefs and behaviors in West Africa.
Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming at the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Comparative Politics, and The Journal of Modern African Studies, among others. Her current book project, The Autocratic Voter: Partisanship and Political Socialization under Dictatorship, investigates why people living in autocratic regimes choose to get involved in politics. In preparation of the manuscript, she spent fourteen months in Cameroon conducting fieldwork in order to explore how and why ordinary people choose to engage in elections that never result in electoral turnover.
She teaches classes in both the graduate and undergraduate program on political economy of development, African politics, and elections and democracy. As the directing member of the African Studies Institute’s Executive Committee, she promotes African studies and cultural events on campus.
