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Adriane Stewart Fresh

Assistant Research Professor in the Social Science Research Institute
Social Science Research Institute
140 Science Drive, 281 Gross Hall, Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours By appointment (Room 281 Gross Hall).  

Overview


I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. I received my PhD in Political Science at Stanford in 2017, and my MA in Economics at Stanford in 2015.  Prior to arriving at Duke, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. 

I study the political economy of development. My research concerns how elites respond to dramatic economic and institutional changes. I'm interested in the effects of these changes on elite persistence and the strategies that elites employ to contend with potential disruptions to their power. I study a diverse set of historical time periods and country contexts including the Industrial Revolution in Britain, regime change in Chile, and black enfranchisement in the US. I am interested in quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in causal inference in the context of observational research, as well as natural language processing using large corpuses of historical and historiographical text.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Assistant Research Professor in the Social Science Research Institute · 2025 - Present Social Science Research Institute, University Institutes and Centers
Assistant Research Professor of Political Science · 2025 - Present Political Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published October 17, 2023
Helping Social Scientists Grow an Idea into a Research Project

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Recent Publications


Elite Persistence in the Era of England’s Expanding Overseas Trade

Journal Article Comparative Political Studies · January 1, 2025 This paper considers the consequences of England’s 17th-century dramatic expansion of overseas trade for the persistence and turnover of political elites. I study the extent to which “new” commercial economic interests—individuals involved in expanding tra ... Full text Cite

The Political Legacy of Politician Trajectories During the Pinochet Regime

Chapter · January 1, 2025 This chapter investigates the determinants of political survival across Chile’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) using individual-level biographical data on the universe of congressional politicians paired with archival data on their trajectories under th ... Full text Cite

Population and Political Change in Industrial Britain

Journal Article · February 21, 2024 Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Stanford University · 2017 Ph.D.

External Links


Personal Website