Elizabeth Wood is the Ford International Professor of History at MIT.

She is the author of three books, Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (Woodrow Wilson Center and Columbia University Press, 2016, co-authored); Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2005); and The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana University Press, 1997). She has also written numerous scholarly articles on Russian politics, gender, and performance, as well as blogs and other publications about Russian history and current events, including especially Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Within MIT, Professor Wood serves as founding director of the MIT Ukraine Program, co-director of the MIT-Eurasia Program, coordinator of Russian Studies, and adviser to the Russian Language Program. In the past she has served as chair of the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program and co-chair of the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies.

She has also been the faculty sponsor of an undergraduate research program focusing on studies of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia.