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Ann Towns

Professor

Department of Political Science
Telephone
+46 31-786 11 53
Mail
ann.towns@gu.se
Visiting address
Sprängkullsgatan 19
41123 Göteborg
Room number
A503
Postal address
Box 711
40530 Göteborg

About Ann Towns

Ann Towns was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1970 but received all her social science training in the United States. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota in 2004, under the supervision of Kathryn Sikkink, and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg with a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant and then an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Since 2014, she has been employed at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, where she was promoted to professor in 2018.

Towns has extensive international engagements. She has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2025, at the University of Cambridge in 2024, at Georgetown University in 2017-2018, and at the University of Oslo in 2017-2019. She has also held many international positions in academic organizations (such as the International Studies Association and the European International Studies Association) and scientific journals (such as International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, and more.

Research

Towns' research revolves around issues of social hierarchies, power, and norms in international politics, usually with a focus on gender. Her book Women and States. Norms and Hierarchies in International Society (2010, Cambridge University Press) shows how international norms on women's rights not only standardize states' practices but also rank states — and how states use these norms (such as women's suffrage and gender quotas in national parliaments) to improve their status in the global hierarchy.

Since 2014, she has been running the GenDip research program on gender norms, gendered practices, and hierarchies in diplomacy, an international institution that has long been male-dominated but where a large number of women have recently joined. GenDip also consists of a research network that brings together diplomacy researchers from around the world. The program has been funded by two Wallenberg Academy Fellowships (2014-2026), the Swedish Research Council (2014-2019), and the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2027). Important results from the research program have been published in a number of articles, including in International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies and Cooperation & Conflict. Towns is currently completing a monograph from the program, entitled Imperial, Familial and Bureaucratic: the Global Gender Logics of Bilateral Diplomacy.

Towns' research has been recognized with several awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. The most recent of these were a 2026 Distinguished Scholars Award and a 2018 Bertha Lutz Award, both from the International Studies Association's Diplomatic Studies Section  for her research on diplomacy, and a 2025 Susan N. Northcutt Award from the International Studies Association's Women's Caucus for her record of service and mentoring of women and other underrepresented scholars in international studies.

Teaching

Towns is a passionate teacher who teaches international politics, social theory, and qualitative methodology at all levels, from undergraduate to doctoral. Due to her extensive research commitments, her teaching is unfortunately limited. She teaches the department’s introductory course in international politics and seminars on ontology and research design for doctoral students; she supervises undergraduate and master's theses; and she supervises doctoral students (currently Julian Walterskirchen and Diana Bernardini).

She has supervised four doctoral students to their public defense:

- Monika De Silva (main supervisor, U of Gothenburg, public defense 2024)

- Anne-Kathrin Kreft (main supervisor, U of Gothenburg, public defense 2018)

- Joshua Martineau (main supervisor, U of Delaware, thesis defense 2014)

- Angela Wolfe (main supervisor, U of Delaware, thesis defense 2012)

 For more complete information, see Towns’ CV.