Dr Carol Leonard

Carol Scott Leonard, University Lecturer in Regional Studies of the Post-Communist States from 1997, was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship in October 2011.

She was a Fellow of St Antony’s and, when she first came to Oxford in 1996, a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, after spending two years as resident economic adviser for the US Treasury to the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.

She received her doctorate in history at Indiana University (Bloomington), and taught Russian history at Lafayette College (Pennsylvania), and then as Professor of History at the State University of New York.

Subsequently, she changed fields following graduate study of economics at the California Institute of Technology supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation. A former research associate of the Russian Research Centre of Harvard University, she taught and did research at the College on regional aspects of the transition. She has been a project director and consultant for international donor agency projects on transition issues, including rural poverty, the public sector, and the regional financial sector in Russia and Ukraine.

Since 2012, she has been professor of social science and Director of the Center for Russian Studies at the Presidential Academy for the National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, Russia. She is also a lead researcher in regional studies at the Higher School of Economics. She focuses on Russian agrarian reform, Russia’s Arctic cities, privatization, and the economic history of Russia and the Soviet Union.

Publications: Her book publications include Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (1993), Agrarian Organization during Industrialization: Europe, Russia and America in the Nineteenth Century (1989), Microeconomic Change in Central and Eastern Europe (2002), Agrarian Reform in Russia: The Road from Serfdom (2011, 2015), translated into Russian as Agrarnye reform v Rossii: doroga iz rabstva (2019), Privatization and Transition in Russia in the Early 1990s (with David Pitt-Watson) (2013) and forthcoming, The Russian Revolution: Memory and Legacy (with Daniel Orlovsky and Yurij Petrov).