Assistant Professor of Political Science
Areas of Specialization: African Politics; Comparative Politics; Social Movements; Qualitative Methods
Marcus Walton is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.
His research is on democracy and urban politics in the Global South, with a specific focus on African politics. His book We Have the Rights: Democracy and Protest in Three African Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2026), is a decades long comparison of urban riots in Cairo, Egypt, as well as Lagos, Nigeria, and Johannesburg, South Africa. The book focuses the impact of democratization on both the forms and varying outcomes of these protest over time. His more recent research looks at the politics of affordable housing in Cape Town, South Africa and Boston, Massachusetts. His work has been featured in journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (QMMR).
He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Brown University (2019). He has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at the Public Affairs Research Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa and a lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand.
Additional Information:
Curriculum Vitae