Olena Nikolayenko

Olena Nikolayenko is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Honors Program at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law before joining Fordham. She also held visiting appointments at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, the Project House Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany), the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University (Japan), and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). Her research interests include comparative democratization, contentious politics, women’s activism, labor, and youth, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe. Her recent book, Invisible Revolutionaries: Women’s Participation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan (Cambridge University Press, 2025), examines women’s engagement in a contemporary revolution.