Paul C. Avey

Paul Avey is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech.

His research and teaching interests include nuclear politics, U.S. foreign policy, strategy, and international relations theory. He is the author of Tempting Fate: Why Nonnuclear States Confront Nuclear Opponents (Cornell University Press, 2019), and author or coauthor of articles in International Security, Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Texas National Security Review, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Foreign Policy.

Avey was a 2018-2019 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow based at the U.S. Department of Defense, serving as Advisor for Strategy in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. Before coming to Virginia Tech, Avey was a pre-doctoral fellow with the Managing the Atom project and International Security Program at Harvard’s Belfer Center for International Studies, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MIT, and a postdoctoral fellow with the Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU. He earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in political science and history from the University of Iowa.