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 of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

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 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 Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.