Erin Lin is an associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University, where she studies violence, economic development, gender, and the costs of war for soldiers and civilians alike, long after the fighting ends. Her focus is Cambodia, where American aircraft dropped roughly half a million tons of bombs in a secret campaign aimed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail — and where, fifty years later, the unexploded ordnance still determines which fields get farmed and which are left to go to seed. Her current work focuses on the Marshall Islands and legacy of nuclear displacement.
Lin's method pairs fieldwork with hard evidence. She has sat with farmers in villages built around old bomb craters and shown that what they told her scales up, matching their accounts against satellite imagery, original econometric analysis, and archival records. Lin is the author of When the Bombs Stopped, a profile of three Cambodian farmers, one village, and one minefield, showing how bombs tend to fail on the most fertile land, rendering it too dangerous to farm. The book has won more than half a dozen awards, spanning political methodology, comparative politics, and international relations.
A graduate of Yale University (BA) and Princeton University (PhD), Lin teaches courses on the politics of the developing world and qualitative writing at Ohio State. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Mines Advisory Group, a demining and disarmament organization, and in 2022 received a Young Investigator award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Before becoming a professor, Lin worked the field crew at an organic vegetable farm in Pennington, New Jersey. A North Texas native, she resides in Columbus, Ohio with her family.
