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 religion, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Her research focuses on the institutions that make political violence knowable: how testimony becomes evidence, how bureaucracies decide what counts as proof, and how those decisions shape what governments, courts, and historians can later see. At the center of her work is a simple problem: institutions do not merely record violence. They establish thresholds for recognizing it.
Her dissertation, Desaparecidos: Church Documentation, Internal Conflict, and the Evidence of Disappearance in Chile, 1973–1980, examines how church-based institutions in Santiago documented enforced disappearance under Augusto Pinochet. Beginning with the ecumenical Comité de Cooperación para la Paz and continuing after 1976 with the Catholic Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the project traces the documentary and legal practices through which uncertain family reports became cases, statistics, legal petitions, and eventually part of the dictatorship's official record. It asks who could cross those evidentiary thresholds, what happened to claims that could not, how the move from an ecumenical organization to a Catholic one changed the work, and how Chilean evidence was later received and reformatted by institutions such as the U.S. government.
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).
Her research has been supported by grants from the Clements Center for National Security, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.
Maddie 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’s National Security Council and the Office of the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. She also 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 teaches undergraduates, explores outside, or turns 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.