Elizabeth A. Wood

Elizabeth Wood is the author of three books, Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (Woodrow Wilson Center and Columbia University Press, 2016); Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2005) and The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana University Press, 1997). She has also written numerous scholarly articles on gender and performance as well as blogs and other publications about Russian history and current events.

Within MIT, Professor Wood serves as co-director of the MISTI Russia Program, Coordinator of Russian Studies (minors, concentrations), and adviser to the Russian Language Program. She holds a secondary appointment in MIT’s Global Studies and Languages Section.

She has served recently (2011-13) as the co-chair of the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies.

She is the faculty sponsor of a UROP on studies of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia.

Professor Wood also contributes occasionally to the Russian History blog.

Articles and Publications

“Right-Wing Populism as Gendered Performance: Janus-faced Masculinity in the Leadership of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdogan” (coauthored with Betül Ekşi), Theory & Society 48, 5 (2019): 733-751

“February 23 and March 8: Two Holidays that Upstaged the February Revolution, 1917-1923,”Slavic Review 76, 3 (2017): 732-740

“The Trial of the New Woman: Citizens-in-Training in the New Soviet Republic,” Gender & History 13, 3 (2001): 524-45

“The Woman Question in Russia: Contradictions and Ambivalence” in Abbott Gleason, ed., A Companion to Russian History (Blackwell Publishing, 2009), pp. 353-67