Juliet Johnson

Juliet Johnson is Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She studied Politics at Princeton University (PhD 1997) and International Relations at Stanford University (AB 1990), as well as intensive Russian at Middlebury College (1993) and Indiana University (1994). She has conducted field research in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Slovakia. An ASEEES/AAASS member since 1995, she has served on the Board of Directors (2018-20), the Investment Committee (2017-present), the Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize Committee (2015-17), and the Nominating Committee (2006-07).  

Johnson has a deep commitment to interdisciplinarity, with research interests ranging from post-communist finance to memory and commemoration. Her work on finance has explored Russian banking in the 1990s, central bank transformation across the post-communist world, euro (non)adoption in the new EU member states, Russian currency politics, and the rise of financial nationalism after the 2008 global financial crisis. Her work on memory politics has examined the fate of Soviet-era monuments in Moscow, comparative cultures of public memory in Russia and Germany, the relationship between regime type and public memory, and how the post-communist experience can inform debates over Confederate monuments in the United States.  

She has taught courses on Russian and Soviet Politics, Russian and Soviet Foreign Policy, East European Politics, Post-Communist Transformations, Europe and Memory, Women in Russia (with comparative literature scholar John Kopper), and Memory, Place, and Power (with geographer Benjamin Forest). She has received McGill’s H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching (2007) and David Thomson Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching (2018).  

She is the author of two books: A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), and Priests of Prosperity: Transnational Central Bankers and Post-Communist Transformation (Cornell 2016), which won the Davis Center Prize, the Shulman Prize, and the Hewett Prize at the 2017 ASEEES annual meeting. She co-edited Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam (Ashgate 2005) with philosopher Marietta Stepaniants and geographer Benjamin Forest. She has also published over 35 articles and book chapters, as well as numerous policy-oriented articles and op-eds.  

Johnson is currently Network Director of the Jean Monnet network Between the EU and Russia: Domains of Diversity and Contestation, a research group spanning 11 universities and six countries that studies how the EU and Russia influence minority politics, integration efforts, and societal contestation on the EU’s eastern borders. She co-leads the Post-Communist Monuments Project, which traces the transformation of the monumental landscape across 26 post-communist countries. She served as Lead Editor of Review of International Political Economy for five years and currently sits on the Editorial Boards of six international journals. She is a member of PONARS-Eurasia and previously served on the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute, as Chair of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association, and as McGill Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal, among other institutional leadership roles.  

She is committed to upholding ASEEES’s principles of diversity and inclusion, its longstanding dedication to interdisciplinary engagement and inquiry, and its efforts to support the research and professional development of young scholars in our field.