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63 FIFTH AVENUE,
NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

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Jessica Pisano

Jessica Pisano received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Politics Department at the New School for Social Research. She has written extensively on contemporary and twentieth century politics and political economy in Eastern Europe.

 

JESSICA PISANO received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Politics Department at the New School for Social Research. She is a longtime associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. 

Pisano has written extensively on contemporary and twentieth century politics and political economy in Eastern Europe. She currently is completing a book about capitalism and the state in contemporary Ukraine and Russia, focusing on local command performances of democratic institutions. Her prize-winning book, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has appeared in journals such as World Politics, Social Research, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of Peasant Studies, East European Politics and Societies, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies, among many others, and as chapters in edited volumes. 

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Jessica has been an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has been awarded numerous fellowships nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, among others. In 2017, she received a university-wide award for distinguished teaching at The New School.

As a GIDEST fellow, Jessica examines experiences of fascism, state socialism, and neoliberalism through the lens of material culture, tracing humans’ engagement with and thought about the objects of their labor through the major social experiments of the twentieth century. Focused on a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional community situated along a single street bifurcated by the border between Ukraine and the European Union, this project represents the culmination of a more than decade-long endeavor involving long-term participant-observation research and archival work in six countries.