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, co-authored); 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 Russian politics, gender and performance as well as blogs and other publications about Russian history and current events, including especially Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Within MIT, Professor Wood serves as founding director of the MIT Ukraine Program, co-director of the MIT-Eurasia Program, Coordinator of Russian Studies (majors, minors, concentrations), and adviser to the Russian Language Program. In the past she has served as chair of the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program 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.

Articles and Publications

“Gender Systems in the Putin Autocracy,” Frontiers in Sociology 9 (2024).

“Crimea in My Heart: Visualizing Putin’s Resurgent Empire in 2014,” in Valerie A. Kivelson, Sergei A. Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023)

“U.S.-Russian Partnerships in Science: Working with Differences,” Post-Soviet Affairs 38, 5 (2022): 349-365. 

Response to Andrea Graziosi, “The Weight of the Soviet Past in post-1991 Russia,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 24, 2 (2022): 141-146.

“Performing Memory and its Limits: Vladimir Putin and World War II in Russia” in David L. Hoffmann, ed., The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2021), pp. 249-275

“Paradoxes of Gender in Soviet Communist Party Women’s Sections (the Zhenotdel), 1918-1930,” The Routledge International Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, eds., Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda (Routledge 2021): 219-226 

“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