I am an Assistant Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
My research interests are in comparative politics, public policy, and research methodology. I study the political economy of inequality in Latin America and its relationship with development and violence.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, PNAS, Perspectives on Politics, Sociological Methods & Research, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, Revista de Ciencia Política, Studies in Comparative International Development, and the Journal of Comparative Politics. I am currently writing a book, Contested Development: Land Reform Sequences and the Remaking of Inequality in Latin America, which explains why similar liberal land reforms (1960s) produced divergent sequences of reinforcement, radicalization, and counter-reform, and how these sequences shaped inequality and the redistributive capacity of states beyond land.
Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where I also completed an M.S. in Statistics. I hold M.A. and B.A. degrees in Economics from Universidad de los Andes in my hometown of Bogotá, Colombia.
My research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Toronto’s Munk School, the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center at Princeton University, the Buffett Institute, the Kellogg Dispute Resolution Research Center, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.
You can contact me by email at laura.garciamontoya[at]utoronto[dot]ca or laura.garcia[at]gmail[dot]com.
