Danielle Leavitt
WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-27
Danielle Leavitt is a historian of modern Ukraine and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Russian and Ukrainian relations, human age, generation, and gender. Her work examines the function of generation and human age in Soviet history and works to insert the stories of underrepresented populations, such as the elderly and women, into consequential debates about stagnation, cultural life, Soviet collapse, post-Soviet economic and political development, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Dr. Leavitt’s first book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (2025, FSG), charted the lives of seven Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Based on a unique set of online diaries, Leavitt contextualized her seven subjects, Ukrainian society, and its predicaments for a wide audience, introducing readers to a rigorous but accessible history of Ukraine, the Soviet Union, its collapse, and Russia’s historical relationship with its neighbors.
Leavitt received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2023. From 2023-2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Education
- PhD, History, Harvard University, 2023
- MA, History, Harvard University, 2018
- BA, Russian, Brigham Young University, 2015
Awards and Honors
- 2022 Harvard Griffin GSAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
- 2021, 2019 Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship
- 2020, 2017 HURI Summer Research Grant
- 2018 Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Summer Research Grant
- 2016 Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Scholarship, Harvard University
- 2016 Merle Fainsod Prize, Harvard University
- 2015 Russian Scholar Laureate, The American Council of Teachers of Russian
Liudmila Listrovaya
WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-26
As an environmental and political sociologist specializing in Russia, Liudmila Listrovaya's research spans environmental inequality and governance, authoritarian populism, and war-prompted migration. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon in 2024, during which she also completed a six-month internship with the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva.
Dr. Listrovaya's current research projects include exploring the intersection of authoritarian populism and environmental issues in Russia, focusing on how the history of internal colonialism and ethnicity discourse has shaped environmental inequality and its perceptions. Another key project examines the war in Ukraine and its consequences, specifically regime-prompted outmigration from Russia. For this, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia and collected interviews with Russian political migrants. Her research has been published in Qualitative Sociology and accepted for publication in Society and Natural Resources. At WCEE, she will transform her dissertation into a book manuscript and continue her research on the consequences of the war in Ukraine, further developing it into a comparative study of Russian and Ukrainian war-time migrants and their pathways to integration and peacebuilding in host states. In the Winter 2025 term, she taught the course “Environment, Politics, and Society in Russia,” cross-listed between CREES, Program in the Environment (PitE), and Sociology.
Education
- PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, 2024
- MS, Sociology, University of Oregon, 2019
- Specialist of Cultural Studies in Chinese Culture, St. Petersburg State University, 2015
Awards and Honors
- Marvin E. Olsen Student Paper Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association, 2023
- Summer Dissertation Writing Grant, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2023
- David S. Easly Memorial Graduate Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2022-2023
- Graduate Fellowship for International Research, Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, 2021-2022
- Civil Society in Russia Grant, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2018-2019
- Young Leaders Scholarship, Northeast Asian Economic Forum, Hong Kong 2017
