Devin Finn is Visiting Assistant Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. She studies ordinary people’s participation in violence and democratic politics during and after civil wars, including their activities in insurgent groups, political parties, and nonviolent movements. As part of this focus, Finn conducts research on searches for human remains of disappeared persons and victims of armed conflict violence, primarily in Peru and Colombia. In addition to the relationship between political mobilization and large-scale violence, she looks at how peasant politics in Latin America and South Asia have interacted with state and insurgent governance. She arrived at Lehigh in 2021, after four years teaching in the Department of Political Science at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Finn completed her PhD at Georgetown University in the Department of Government.
Finn studies the comparative politics of rural participation, development, and extractive industry —particularly mining and governance—in Andean societies. From 2017 to 2019, Finn was the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo at Universidad de los Andes. Previously, she was a pre/postdoctoral research fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Finn has worked at the United States Institute of Peace, the United Nations, and the Inter-American Dialogue. She has experience conducting field research in Peru, Colombia, India, and Nepal.