Jennifer Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in PoLIS. Her main research interests are gender and foreign policy (particularly the concept of a 'feminist' foreign policy); gender and security; women’s rights in post-conflict divided societies; and sexual and reproductive health and rights in international policy-making.

She is the author of Abortion Law and Political Institutions: Explaining Policy Resistance (Palgrave, 2019), which addresses abortion politics in Northern Ireland. Her work has been published in, amongst others, European Journal of International Security, International Studies Review, International Studies Perspectives, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations and the International Political Science Review.

From 2022-2026 she is PI on the ESRC New Investigator project Gender in Foreign Policymaking: the academic and policy implications of feminist foreign policy. She is also a CoI on a 5-year UKRI-funded project on menstrual justice in low- and middle-income countries (Mejara - Menstrual Justice in Nepal and Guatemala (mejara-project.com).