I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, with a joint appointment in the College of Public Health.

My research asks when and why states walk away from international commitments, and what exit reveals about how international law works. My book, Principled and Pragmatic Exit: Understanding Treaty Withdrawal , draws on an original dataset of withdrawals from League of Nations and UN-registered treaties. It shows that exit follows two distinct logics. Sometimes states leave to escape constraints they are violating. Sometimes they leave treaties they see as normatively obsolete.

A second line of my work examines health care in armed conflict and humanitarian crises, including the targeting of medical facilities. I also study public attitudes toward international cooperation and politics within international organizations. In public health, I helped create the COVID-19 State Policy Project, a widely used database of US state pandemic policies featured in Nature Medicine and The Lancet.

I teach international law, international organizations, health policy analysis, and the politics of disease control. I am a Lilly Teaching Fellow and received a UGA award for innovative use of AI in the classroom.

Before joining UGA, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington and held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Pittsburgh. Earlier, I worked on refugee and asylum policy for the US Senate Judiciary Committee.

Email: breebangjensen [at] gmail [dot] com | Bree.BangJensen [at] uga [dot] edu