Volha Charnysh

About

Volha Charnysh is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She works in the fields of historical political economy and comparative politics.  

Her book, Uprooted: How Post–WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe (under contract, Cambridge University Press), studies the long-run effects of mass displacement on political and economic development using subnational data from postwar Poland and West Germany. Her other work examines the legacies of wartime violence and repression and the role of identity in state-building and economic development. She draws on extensive archival and field research and employs quantitative analysis of observational and experimental data from Central and Eastern Europe. Her papers have been published in the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, the Annual Review of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals. In 2021, she received the Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award, established by the Council for European Studies to recognize emerging scholars who have made a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary study of Europe.  

She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy and of the Broadstreet Blog, dedicated to interdisciplinary research of historical political economy. She received her PhD in government from Harvard University in 2017.