Vera Smirnova
Ph.D. in Planning, Governance, and Globalization, Virginia Tech
Vera Smirnova is an assistant professor of geography and political science at Kansas State University. She received her Ph.D. at the School of Public and International Affairs, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (2018) and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.
Vera’s research focuses on land and territorial politics, and contributes broadly to political geographic field of study, particularly in the context of post-socialist and authoritarian regimes. Her research has explored 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. Vera conducted projects on the Russian land privatization reforms, post-socialist property regimes and underlying forms of dispossession, 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, Geoforum, and the Geographical Journal. She is also an active member of the American Association of Geographers and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and a Chair of the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group at the AAG. At K-State, Vera teaches courses in Human and World Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, and Politics of Russia and the Former Soviet Union.
