Virginia Tilley (born 1953) is an American political scientist specialising in the comparative study of ethnic and racial conflict. She is Professor of Political Science at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in the US. Background Tilley's grandfather was the early filmmaker W.H. Tilley. Her parents were English professor Wesley H. Tilley, Jr. and Barbara. She has two siblings, John and Susan. She grew up in Gainesville, Florida, Davidson, North Carolina, Decatur, Illinois, New York and Absecon, New Jersey. In her youth she developed a keen interest in science fiction and in the natural sciences, especially animal behavior. Career Tilley received her BA in Political Science from Antioch College (1986) and an MA from the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown (1988). She completed an MA and PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1997), where she studied comparative politics and theories of ethnic, racial and national identities under Professor M. Crawford Young and international relations theory under Professors Michael Barnett and Emanuel Adler. After finishing her MA in Arab Studies at Georgetown, she served as Assistant Director of the International Organisation for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD) in Washington DC, where she developed a second field in the politics of indigenous peoples. This interest led her to focus her doctoral dissertation on the politics of 'being Indian' or indigeneity in Latin America, published in 2005 as Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation and Power in El Salvador (University of New Mexico Press). In 1997, Tilley joined the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) where she taught courses on Latin American politics, the politics of development, and Middle East politics, as well as introductory courses on international relations and comparative politics and senior seminars on comparative racial and ethnic conflict. With Professor Kevin Dunn, she developed the International Relations Major and served as Co-coordinator, and for several years led the Development Studies minor. She was appointed as Associate Professor in 2003 but in 2005 took leave to conduct research in South Africa, initially at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. In 2006, Tilley went on extended leave from HWS to assume a senior post at the Human Sciences Research Council (South Africa) (HSRC), where she conducted studies of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, with special projects on poverty alleviation and rural development. In 2011, she left South