1066A Seaton Hall
785-532-6727
verasmirnova@k-state.edu

Ph.D., 2018, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

My work falls at the intersection of political geography, urban and territorial politics and explores relations between land and power and their various manifestations in pre-and post-Soviet Russia. This topic of inquiry taps into two wider debates - on private property and on territory at large. Through this lens, I study how rights to land ownership and other modes of the appropriation of space are negotiated and how territorial policies are performed using formal and informal political tools. In particular, I conduct research on Russian land privatization reforms, as well as conceptions of territorial integrity in Russian political and geographic thought and their contemporary geopolitical implications.

• Smirnova, V. 2022. From the commune to the 'borderless world'. Russian conceptions of land and ownership. Connections, European Network in Universal and Global History, (in print).
• Smirnova, V. and Adrianova, E. 2022. From Systemic Underdevelopment to Basic Urban Maintenance: National Priority Projects in the Russian Periphery. Changing Societies & Personalities, 6(2):433-454.
• Zupan, D., Smirnova, V. and Zadorian, A. 2021. Governing through stolichnaya praktika: Housing renovation from Moscow to the regions. Geoforum, 120:155-164.
• Smirnova, V. 2019. Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery. Geographica Helvetica, 74(1):13-25.

• GEOG 100 World Geography and Globalization
• GEOG 200 Human Geography
• GEOG 550 Political Geography and Geopolitics
• GEOG 750 Urban Geography
• POLSC 630 Politics of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

Vera Smirnova is originally from a large industrial city in the Russian North, which she left in 2012 after receiving Fulbright graduate fellowship to pursue Master of Science in Environment-Behavior and Place Studies at K-State. Later, she completed her Ph.D. at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech in 2018 and was a Postdoctoral research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. Her work draws on a wide network of collaborations that she maintains with colleagues and institutions across Central and Eastern Europe.

In addition to researching and teaching post-Soviet politics and political geography at K-State, she is also a co-chair of the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group at the American Association of Geographers and an Adjunct researcher at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.