Linda J. Cook is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Slavic Studies at Brown University; an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Former Academic Supervisor, International Laboratory for Social Integration Research, Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her research interests include welfare regimes in the Russian Federation and East-Central European Postcommunist states, comparatively and globally; labor politics, and the politics of authoritarian regimes.
Cook is author of The Soviet Social Contract and Why it Failed (Harvard, 1993), Postcommunist Welfare States (Cornell, 2007, 2013; Russian translation Academic Studies Press, 2021); three co-edited volumes, and articles in Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Post-Soviet Affairs, Social Policy and Society, Voluntas, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism and other publications. Cook is the recipient of a Fulbright award, has been a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Finland, Team Leader of a project with UNRISD, “New Directions in Social Policy,” and project collaborator at the Norwegian Research Council. She has made many research visits to the Former Soviet Union and Russia.
She is currently participating in a project on “Global Welfare Regimes: Social Assistance Systems across Countries,” supported by the Taiwan National Science and Technology Council. Cook’s current research focuses on international migration and welfare nationalism. Her book, Welfare Nationalism in Europe and Russia: The Politics of 21st Century Exclusionary and Inclusionary Migrations, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.