Elise Giuliano

Elise Giuliano is a political scientist at Columbia University where she teaches courses on secession and nationalism, Russian politics, and international relations. She is the academic advisor to graduate students at Columbia’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Prof. Giuliano’s research focuses on the intersection of politics and identity. Her book—Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics (Cornell University Press, 2011)—examines why some mass populations in Russia’s ethnic republics supported nationalist separatism while others remained quiescent. In 2012 the book won the ENMISA Book Award of the International Studies Association for the best book published over the past two years in the study of the international politics of ethnicity, nationalism, or migration. Prof. Giuliano is currently researching the politics of blame following natural and man-made disasters in Russia.

After working as a consultant in Moscow and Novgorod for USAID on a privatization project in the 1990s, she conducted field research in Tatarstan, Russia as a Fulbright-Hays scholar. Prof. Giuliano has taught at the University of Miami and Barnard College. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).

Prof. Giuliano was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.