biography

Patricia Sullivan is an assistant professor in the Department of International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), at the University of Georgia.  She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis in 2004, majoring in international relations, comparative politics, and research methodology.  In addition to her coursework at UC Davis, she attended the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the University of Michigan in 2000 and Columbia University’s Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (SWAMOS) in 2001. In 2006, she participated in the Philip Merrill Strategic Studies Teachers’ Workshop, sponsored by the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches undergraduate courses in international relations including both introductory courses and upper-division classes on IR theory, national security policy, peace studies, and international conflict. She also teaches graduate seminars in security studies and American foreign policy.  She is currently associate director of SPIA’s study abroad program in Ecuador.     
   
Dr. Sullivan’s research explores the utility of military force as a policy instrument, the determinants of war outcomes, and the factors that affect leaders’ decisions to initiate, escalate, or terminate foreign military operations.  She has published articles on the determinants of conflict outcomes in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Interactions.  An article on the duration of major power military interventions is forthcoming in Conflict Management and Peace Science.  Her research, which combines rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methodology, has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and the University of Georgia Research Foundation.  In addition to presenting at numerous professional conferences, Sullivan has been invited to present her research at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at Duke University; the Journeys in World Politics workshop at the University of Iowa; California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly); and the University of South Carolina.      

Dr. Sullivan’s dissertation, which explores why militarily strong states frequently fail to achieve their political objectives when they use military force, received both the 2004-2006 Walter Isard Dissertation Award, given every two years by the Peace Science Society International, and the 2005 Dissertation Award from the Committee on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (CAMOS), a group affiliated with the American Political Science Association.