Oxana Shevel is an associate professor of comparative politics at Tufts University’s Department of Political Science and director of the Tufts International Relations Program. Her research and teaching focus on the post-Soviet region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and on issues such as nation-building, identity politics, citizenship policies, memory politics, church-state relations, and democratization processes.
She is a co-author (with Maria Popova) of a book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023). Her earlier book, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge, 2011) which examines refugee-admission policies in the postcommunist region, won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) best book prize. Prof. Shevel’s research has appeared in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals; her commentary has appeared in publications including Foreign Affairs and The Washington Post.
Prof. Shevel also serves as vice president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities and of the AAUS. She’s a country expert on Ukraine for the Global Citizenship Observatory, a member of the PONARS Eurasia scholarly network, and a board member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. She's an associate of both the Davis Center and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).
Outside of academia, she has served as a consultant for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and for the U.S. Department of State and has provided expert testimony on applications for asylum in U.S. courts.
Prof. Shevel 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.
