• International Environmental Politics
• Comparative Environmental Activism and Politics
• Politics of Post-Communist Societies

Professor Dawson received her A.B. in Chemistry and Russian from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. in Chemistry from Harvard, and M.A. in Soviet Studies from The Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley.

Her dissertation,"Social Mobilization in Post-Leninist Societies: The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Nuclear power Movement in the USSR," is a fascinating study of the emergence of environmental activism in the USSR in the Gorbachev period, which offers an intriguing explanation of how and why it ultimately took the form of nationalist mobilization against Soviet rule. The dissertation was published as a book titled Eco-Nationalism: Antinuclear Activism and National Identity in Russian, Lithuania, and Ukraine, and awarded the 1997 Marshall Shulman Book Prize. In addition to this book, she published a number of articles in refereed journals, and has been an active presenter and participant at professional conferences.

She is currently embarking on a much more ambitious global study, examining in greater detail how environmentalism may be linked to a variety of subgroup identities across a broad spectrum of political settings and the implications of this linkage for the achievement of domestic and international environmental policy objectives.

Ms. Dawson was formerly an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Russian and East European Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Prior to that, she held a tenure-track position in the political science department at Wellesley College. She was recently awarded the William Piche Prize in recognition of her teaching and research record.

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