Volha Charnysh

Volha Charnysh is the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies the role of identity in state-building and economic development and the long-term effects of violence. Volha's regional focus is Europe and Eurasia.

Her book, “Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe” (2024, Cambridge University Press) examines the enduring consequences of mass displacement and resulting cultural heterogeneity on social cohesion, state-building, and economic development in Poland and West Germany. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, and European Journal of International Relations. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy (JHPE) and Broadstreet Blog. 

Volha received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2017. She has held fellowships at Princeton Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, and Stanford University (W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution).