Jessica Pisano

Jessica Pisano is professor of politics at the New School for Social Research. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine. Pisano writes and teaches about contemporary and 20th-century politics and history in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2022) and the prize-winning book The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Pisano is currently writing a book about a single street in southwestern Ukraine governed by seven different countries in as many decades and its lessons for people confronting rapid political change today. Her essays about American, Ukrainian, and Russian politics, and about Ukrainians’ efforts to build a creedal nation, have appeared in POLITICO Magazine and The Washington Post. Pisano engages with audiences across the political spectrum, contributing to broadcasts such as The Michael Medved Show, Inside Sources, POTUS radio, and The World.

Pisano’s project, “How Russia and Its Allies Polarize America,” analyzes how the Kremlin intervenes in democracies using psychological warfare techniques, and how everyday people change their behavior as a result. Drawing on years of research in communities in Ukraine that have been targets of Kremlin political influence operations, and using ethnographic methods to analyze changes in communities in the United States, this study will provide a missing piece of our understanding of foreign polarization efforts, suggesting that examining how these techniques work can help those in democratic societies identify and resist efforts to turn people against one another.

May 2026