Gwendolyn Sasse

Gwendolyn Sasse is the Director of the Centre of East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin, Einstein Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Previously, she was Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. Prior to her arrival in Oxford in 2007, she was a Senior Lecturer in the European Institute and the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the LSE (which was awarded the LSE Robert McKenzie Prize for the best dissertation).

Her research has concentrated on issues of democracy and authoritarianism, war and migration, with a particular emphasis on Eastern Europe (esp. Ukraine).

Her book The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2007; paperback 2014) won the Alexander Nove Prize, the Annual Book Prize awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. Based on her long-standing research on Ukraine she published "Russia's War against Ukraine" in 2023 (Polity Press, previously published in German by C.H. Beck in 2022).

Since 2014 she has been a non-resident Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe.