The Director
Karen Dawisha is the Director of the Havighurst Center and is also the Walter E. Havighurst Professor of
Political Science at Miami University. She graduated with honors in Russian and Political Science from the University of Lancaster in England and received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.
She has served as an advisor to the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she was a member of the Policy Planning Staff and the Bureau of Political Military Affairs of the U.S. State Department (1985-7). Until the summer of 2000 she was a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and the Director of its Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies. She has had extensive overseas experience, living abroad from 1969-1983 in England, 1990-91 in Egypt, and having done more than two dozen research trips to Russia, Central and Eastern Europe,and Central Asia, as well as with extensive travel to Europe and the Middle East.
Her major publications include: Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press); Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge University Press); The Kremlin and the Prague Spring (California University Press; The Soviet Union in the Middle East: Politics and Perspectives (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs); Soviet East-European Dilemmas: Coercion, Competition, and Consent (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs; and Soviet Foreign Policy Toward Egypt (Macmillan).
She was also the series co-editor of the 10-volume International Politics of Eurasia published by M.E.Sharpe and has also edited or co-edited several volumes in that series, including: Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia; The End of Empire? TheTransformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective; and The International Dimension of Post Communist Transitions in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Finally, she has coedited a four-volume series published by Cambridge University Press on Authoritarianism and Democratization in Post-communist Societies. The volumes are The Consolidation of Democracy in East Central Europe; Politics, Power and the Struggle for Democracy in South-East Europe; Conflict, Cleavage and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus; and Democratic Changes and Authoritarian Reactions in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.
Professor Dawisha has received Fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the British Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays. She has been a Principal Investigator for projects funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Smith Richardson, the Social Science Research Council, Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Department of Education and the State 
Department. She has served on the national boards of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the British National Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, the Kennan Institute, and the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Eurasia and Committee on Peace and Security.
Karen Dawisha was born in Colorado, is a US citizen, and is married to Adeed Dawisha, also at Miami University. They have two children.
You can learn more about Dr. Dawisha on her website: www.users.muohio.edu/dawishkl/index.html
