Nora Webb Williams, PhD

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Copies of my published and working papers are available on the Social Science Research Network and on ResearchGate. You can track my code and find replication files on Github.

Are you wondering how to cite me? While legally my last name is Williams, professionally I use the last name Webb Williams (no hyphen), so I prefer to be cited as "Webb Williams, Nora."

Here's a third person bio that summarizes my work:

Nora Webb Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Political Science PhD from the University of Washington and a dual Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. Her research addresses economic resilience and the long-term impacts of colonialism on social trust with a regional focus on the former Soviet Union. She also writes about the impact of social media and images on protest mobilization, examining diverse cases such as the 2010 revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Her primary methodological interest is in images as data for social science research, with related interests in machine learning, text as data, and causal inference. Notable experiences outside of the university setting include serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan and Liberia. Professor Webb Williams's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Minerva Research Initiative. Her work has been published in the Cambridge Elements series in Quantitative and Computational Methods for the Social Sciences, Policy Studies Journal, Political Research Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, and Law and Social Inquiry, among other outlets. She is co-author (with Kosuke Imai) of the Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction in tidyverse textbook from Princeton University Press.