Summary
Laura Blume is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) program at UNR. Laura earned her PhD in political science from Boston University in 2020 and started at UNR that same year.
Laura’s main research and teaching interests include the war on drugs, violence, organized crime, illicit economies, criminal governance, immigration, and corruption. She has a forthcoming book, The Art of Trafficking: How Politics Shapes Narco-Strategies and Violence in Central America, that uses comparative ethnography to examine the ways in which political contexts influence drug-traffickers’ operational strategies and trafficking-related violence in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The Art of Trafficking is being published with Oxford University Press; it is currently in production and will be available in late 2025. Laura’s research has also been published in other outlets including Comparative Political Studies, Political Geography, Journal of Politics in Latin America, NACLA Report on the Americas, and World Development.
In 2022, Laura won a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award for her project, “Cataloguing Murder: Tracking Violence Against Public Figures in Central America.” This project is compiling a comprehensive dataset of all politicians, members of the media, judicial officials, activists and community leaders who have been assassinated in Central America over a 15-year time period. See more on the Violence Against Public Figures (VAPF) project here.
Research interests
- Comparative politics
- Human security
- Criminal governance
- Illicit economies
- The War on Drugs
- Corruption
- Central America
- Mexico
- Immigration
- Political violence
- Ethnography
Courses taught
- PSC 403Q/603Q: The Drug War
- PSC 408F/608F: Border Politics
- PSC 781: Political Science as a Discipline (Research Design)
- PSC 211: Introduction to Comparative Politics
- PSC 407E/607E: Political Systems of Latin America
- PSC 407Q/607Q: Political Violence
- PSC 403Z: Special Topics in Public Policy & Public Administration
- PSC 405F: Problems of World Politics
Education
- Ph.D., Political Science, Boston University, 2020
- B.A., Political Science, Simmons College, 2013