Aili Tripp is Professor of Political Science and Evjue Bascom Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD in political science from Northwestern University, following her MA and BA from the University of Chicago. An expert on African politics, her research has focused on women and politics, transnational feminism, and the informal economy.

Most recently she published Women and Power in Postconflict Africa (2015), which won the Best Book on African Politics Award of the African Politics Conference Group. Her other books include Women and Politics in Uganda (2000), which won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award, and Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (2010). She co-authored African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes (2009), which won a Choice award. She has published numerous edited volumes on women’s movements, transnational feminism and other concerns.

In 2014, Tripp received the African Studies Association’s Public Service Award. She is active on the steering committees of the Social Science Research Council’s Next Generation Social Science in Africa Program and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program. She has been president of the African Studies Association and vice president of the American Political Science Association. She has served as an expert consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Bank, US Agency for International Development, US State Department, Finnish Foreign Ministry, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on violence against women, and numerous other agencies.