Biography

Tasha Fairfield joined the Department of Political and Social Sciences in September 2025, moving from the London School of Economics. She holds a Ph.D in political science from UC Berkeley. Her comparative politics research has analyzed the political economy of inequality, the politics of policy formulation, and business-state relations in Latin America. Fairfield received the 2024 APSA-QMMR David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award for her methodological work on Bayesian analysis for qualitative research, including Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference (CUP 2022), which was initiated during a 2017–18 Mellon Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She convenes the Qualitative Bayesian Reasoning Network for scholars interested in employing the method. Fairfield’s research has appeared in journals including Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. Her current research interests include the distributive politics of climate change.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Bayesian Inference for Qualitative Evidence
• Environmental and Climate Politics Working Group

Supervisees

• Bruno Pacchiotti
• Ninni Eliassen Zinober

Fields of expertise