Jessica Pisano

Jessica Pisano is Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine. She has been an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She writes and teaches about contemporary and twentieth-century politics and economy in Eastern Europe. Her books Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2022) and prize-winning The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008) drew on her long-term research in communities along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and the EU. She currently is writing a book about place and belonging on a single street in Eastern Europe under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy. Her work has appeared in Politico and The Washington Post. Pisano is the founding faculty director of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies research group, created in 2017. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, among others.