Maddie Shorman
Phd Student, the university of texas at austin
Maddie Shorman is a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she studies the intersection of religion, politics, and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Her work draws from political theory, theology, and diplomatic history to ask questions about power, legitimacy, and belief. At the heart of her research is one core idea: foreign policy is interpreted, resisted, and reshaped by those who live with its consequences.
Her dissertation, Borrowed Words: The Catholic Church, the Alliance for Progress, and the Limits of U.S. Power in Chile, 1961–1990, traces how the moral language the United States used to justify its Cold War policy in Latin America was taken up by the Chilean Catholic Church and eventually turned back into a constraint on U.S. support for the Pinochet dictatorship.
She is a 2026–2027 Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the University of Notre Dame's O'Brien Notre Dame International Security Center (ONDISC), a resident fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, where she contributes to conversations at the intersection of grand strategy and moral authority, and a fellow at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS).
Whether she's tracing Vatican diplomacy during the Cold War or analyzing religious language as strategic texts, her work stays grounded in a single goal: understanding how ideas move power.
She holds degrees in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Arkansas and a Master's in International Studies from the University of Oklahoma. Before her Ph.D., she consulted for the Biden Administration and the Office of the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, and worked as a fellow with the Institute on Science for Global Policy. Her writing has appeared in American Religion, The Duck of Minerva, Political Theology Network, and Not Even Past. When she's not writing, Maddie can be found teaching undergraduates, exploring outside somewhere, or turning her kitchen into a one-day pop-up coffee shop.
A copy of her CV is available here.
CURRENT PROJECT
When the Vicaría de la Solidaridad closed in 1992, two years after Chile's return to democracy, and sixteen years after it was founded to document a dictatorship it ultimately outlasted, it left behind hundreds of thousands of case file documents that Chile's Catholic Church used to document its own government. Maddie's dissertation asks how those files got written in the first place: how the moral language the United States exported through the Alliance for Progress ended up training a generation of priests and lawyers to catalog the very abuses Washington was underwriting. She calls this dynamic "recursive legitimacy," and its cost to the state that started it a "hypocrisy penalty"— the way moral language, once lent abroad, can come home as a debt.
Teaching
Maddie's approach to teaching starts from the same premise as her research: that texts don't interpret themselves. She began as a teaching assistant for the introductory global affairs course at the University of Oklahoma, was promoted to head TA overseeing multiple sections, and later taught research design to first-year doctoral students at the LBJ School — work that has run from walking undergraduates through their first encounter with international relations theory to training graduate students how to read a primary source and formulate research questions.