Vera Smirnova
Ph.D. in Planning, Governance, and Globalization, Virginia Tech
Office: 3019 Seaton Hall
Vera Smirnova is an Assistant Professor at the School of Earth and Environment and the Department of Politicial Science at Kansas State University. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs (2018) and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia (2018-2020).
Vera's research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political geography with a focus on how legal regimes of land governance are used to reconfigure territorial control. As a Russia specialist, she uses Russia as a theory-generating case in the comparative politics of the broader Eurasian region. Vera conducted projects on the post-socialist regimes, land abandonment, state capacity, as well as conceptions of territorial sovereignty in Russian geographic thought and their contemporary geopolitical implications.
Vera's research has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Global Studies Quarterly, and Geoform. At K-State, Vera teaches courses in Human and World Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, and Politics of Russia and the Former Soviet Union.
