Jonathan Acuff
Assistant Professor

Jonathan Acuff received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008, M.A.s in political science from the University of Washington and the University of Iowa in 2000 and 2002 respectively, an M.A.Ed. in social studies from the College of William and Mary in 1996, and a B.A. in History from the College of William and Mary in 1993.

Acuff also completed the Officers Basic Course and Joint Strategic Deployment Planning Course at Ft. Eustis, Virginia in 1993 and is a 1990 graduate of U.S. Army Airborne School, Ft. Benning, Georgia.

From 2004-2008, Acuff was a pre-doctoral instructor at the University of Washington and has served in adjunct faculty positions at Cornish College and Seattle University. He joined the Department of Politics at Saint Anselm in the fall of 2008.

Professor Acuff’s research interests include international organization, state formation and dissolution, ethnicity and nationalism, collective identity and religion, international relations theory, and security studies. He has published on the role of identity and legitimation crisis in the Iranian Revolution in the peer-reviewed journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.

Acuff’s essay “One Nation Under God: Religious Nationalism and Collective Violence” will appear in Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion and Violence. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2009. Professor Acuff is currently revising a chapter for publication in the International Studies Association Compendium and has an article under review at Review of International Studies.

Prior to returning to graduate school, Professor Acuff was a Transportation Corps officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. From 1996 to 1999, he taught social studies at Lafayette High School in Williamsburg, Virginia. During 2002-2003, Acuff worked as a military analyst for the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle.

From 2005 to the present, Acuff has served on the Executive Committee of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, Migration, and Immigration (ENMISA) organized section of the International Studies Association. Acuff is a recipient of ENMISA’s Martin O. Heisler Award and was a Ford Foundation Crossing Borders Fellow at the University of Iowa.

Professor Acuff is a member of the International Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, the Federation of American Scientists, the European Consortium for Political Research, and the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.