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Biography of Walter E. Havighurst | Havighurst Faculty and Staff | Post-Doctoral Fellows

Havighurst Faculty and Staff

Dr. Karen Dawisha is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the director of its Havighurst Center for Russian and Post Soviet Studies. She graduated with honors in Russian and Political Science from the University of Lancaster in England and received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. She has served as an advisor to the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she was a member of the Policy Planning Staff and the Bureau of Political Military Affairs of the U.S. State Department (1985-7). Until the summer of 2000 she was a Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and had served as the Director of its Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies. She has had extensive overseas experience, living abroad from 1969-1983 in England, 1990-91 in Egypt, and having done more than two dozen research trips to Russia, Central and Eastern Europe,and Central Asia, as well as with extensive travel to Europe and the Middle East.

Her major publications include: Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval, (Cambridge University Press, coauthored with Bruce Parrott, 1994); Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge, (Cambridge University Press,1989, 2nd ed., 1990); The Kremlin and the Prague Spring, (California University Press, 1984); The Soviet Union in the Middle East: Politics and Perspectives, (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1982); Soviet East-European Dilemmas: Coercion, Competition, and Consent, (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1981); and Soviet Foreign Policy Toward Egypt, (Macmillan, 1979).

Most recently, as director of the Russian Littoral Project, she was the series editor (with Bruce Parrott) of the 10 volume International Politics of Eurasia, published by M.E.Sharpe and has also edited several volumes in that series, including: Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, (coedited with Adeed Dawisha, 1995), The End of Empire? TheTransformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective, (coedited with Bruce Parrott); The International Dimension of Post Communist Transitions in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, (1997). Finally, she has coedited with Bruce Parrott a four-volume series published by Cambridge University Press on Authoritarian and Democratization in Post-communist Societies. The volumes are The Consolidation of Democracy in East Central Europe; Politics, Power and the Struggle for Democracy in South-East Europe; Conflict, Cleavage and Change in Central Asia and Letter Letter the Caucasus; and Democratic Changes and Authoritarian Reactions in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.
Professor Dawisha has received Fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the British Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was awarded the Distinguished Research Professor prize by the University of Maryland. Funding for the Russian Littoral Project and the Democratization Project came from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Smith Richardson, the Social Science Research Council, Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies and the State Department.

Karen Dawisha was born in Colorado, is a US citizen, and is married to Adeed Dawisha, also at Miami University. They have two children.