Tara Slough

I am an Associate Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University.

I write on the political economy of institutions and development. My current research focuses on the comparative study of bureaucracies and on research design. My work appears in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. My research has been supported by grants from the NSF, USAID, EGAP/DFID, J-PAL, and Innovations for Poverty Action.

I was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 2024-2025 and a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2018-2020. I earned my PhD from Columbia University and BM in Violin Performance and a BA in Political Science from Rice University. Before graduate school, I was a professional violinist.