Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. She is also a member of the EUDO Citizenship expert group as a country expert on Ukraine, and a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) scholarly network.

Her research and teaching focuses on the post-Communist region surrounding Russia and issues such as nation- and state-building, the politics of citizenship and migration, memory politics, and the influence of international institutions on democratization. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge 2011), a book which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. The book received the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) book prize. At present, Professor Shevel is working on a comparative study of the sources of citizenship policies in new post-Communist states and on a project that investigates the causes of the onset of separatist insurgency in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Oxana Shevel’s research has been published in Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, Political Science Quarterly, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Slavic Review, Nationality Papers, and in edited volumes.

Prior to coming to Tufts, Prof. Shevel taught at Purdue University and held post-doctoral appointments at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a B.A. in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine.