Paulina Ochoa Espejo is a political theorist who works at the intersection of democratic theory and the history of political thought. She focuses on popular sovereignty and borders. She has written about populism, the boundaries of the demos, migration and the right to exclude, the relation between democracy and territorial rights and borders’ moral relevance. She also works on Latin American political thought. She is the author of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011); and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow.  

Before joining UVA, she was the William Penn Foundation Professor at Haverford College, an assistant professor at Yale University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame. She has also been a visiting professor at CIDE in Mexico City.  

At present, she is finishing the co-authored textbook Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (forthcoming with SAGE) and working on the monograph Rights of Place: Territory, Property, and Jurisdiction in the Americas.