Valerie Hudson

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She has previously taught at Brigham Young, Northwestern, and Rutgers universities. Her research foci include foreign policy analysis, security studies, gender, and international relations, and methodology. Hudson’s articles have appeared in such journals as International Security, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Foreign Policy Analysis. 

She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography, resulting in feature stories in the New York Times, The Economist, 60 Minutes, and other news publications. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009. 

Winner of numerous teaching awards and recipient of a National Science Foundation research grant and a Minerva Initiative grant, she served as the director of graduate studies for the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies for eight years. She served as Vice President of the International Studies Association from 2011-2012. Hudson is one of the Principal Investigators of the WomanStats Project, which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today. 

She is also a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis and an editorial board member of Politics and Gender, the American Political Science Review, and the International Studies Review. She has testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Her most recent book is Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett and published by Columbia University Press. Her forthcoming book with Patricia Leidl, also from Columbia University Press, is entitled The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy. She and her husband, David, a landscape architect, are the parents of eight children.