Madeline Shorman

Madeline (Maddie) Shorman is a third-year PhD student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where her research examines how religious institutions shape U.S. foreign policy and political legitimacy in Latin America. Her dissertation traces the interpretive and institutional networks through which the Catholic Church mediated moral authority during the Cold War, using a comparative hermeneutical and archival analysis of Brazil and Chile. Grounded in Gadamer’s hermeneutical spiral and Machiavelli’s theory of political order, her work develops a model of “recursive legitimation” to explain how religious readings of state violence re-entered the realm of policy and diplomacy. Maddie’s broader research interests include religion and nationalism, the politics of moral authority, and the intersections of theology, diplomacy, and security. Before joining the LBJ School, she earned her Master’s in International Studies from the University of Oklahoma, where she specialized in security policy and served as a consultant for the Biden Administration and the U.S. Mission to the European Union.