Kim Dionne's research focuses on African politics, particularly interventions to improve the human condition, public opinion, and political behavior. She is the author of Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa (Cambridge University Press 2018). She received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow in Swahili. She held previous faculty appointments at Smith College and Texas A&M University.