Jessica Pisano

Jessica Pisano teaches Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She is a center associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine. Pisano is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell UP, 2022), which draws on long-term participant-observation research to analyze theatrical political economies that sustain support for the Kremlin and change the meanings that attach to political participation, and that has been imitated by some politicians in Ukraine and the United States. Her prize-winning book, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge UP, 2008), drew on research she conducted in villages along the Ukraine-Russia border over the course of a decade. Currently Pisano is writing a history of property under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy on a single street in Eastern Europe between 1938 and 2014. Her series of articles on Ukrainian and Russian politics and American impeachment appeared in the online Washington Post. Recently she has written on the timing of Russia's full-scale invasion in Politico and the artistry of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in The Journal of Democracy and Politico. She is the founding faculty director of the research group Decolonizing Eastern European Studies at The New School, founded in 2017.