Lyudmila Austin

Lyudmila (Lucy) Austin is an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She specializes in migration and nation-building in the late Soviet Union. Her current book project is the first extensive archival study of migration and internal displacement affiliated with the Soviet Union's collapse.

For this project, Lyudmila employs letters and party and state documents from archives in three former Soviet republics (Russia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan but explores Central Asia and the Caucasus more broadly as well) and over fifty oral interviews. Her article, “As the Forest is Chopped, the Chips Fly: The Fall of Soviet Internationalism and Late Perestroika's “Refugee” Problem, 1988–1990,” was published in Slavic Review, the leading journal for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. Lyudmila has received numerous nationally competitive grants to fund her research and study, including a 2018–2019 fellowship from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), a 2020–2021 Academic Fellowship in Russia sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a 2024 Title VIII Combined Research and Language Training Fellowship for which she spent three months in Azerbaijan.

In 2023–2024, she was the Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Michigan State University.