Carolina De Stefano

Carolina de Stefano, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Luiss School of Government.

She is a historian and expert on Russia. She teaches Russian history and politics and contemporary history at the Luiss University in Rome.

After graduating with honours in International Relations from Luiss, she was a researcher on Russia and the Caucasus at ISPI in Milan in 2014. She obtained her PhD at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow with a thesis on the collapse of the USSR and contemporary Russia, with a focus on inter-ethnic conflicts. From 2015 to the present she has lived in Moscow for long periods and is fluent in Russian.

She has been a visiting scholar at George Washington University, a researcher at the University of Warsaw, EHESS in Paris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Eastern Finland, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and in 2024 at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard.

She is the author of the recent “History of Power in Russia. From Tsars to Putin” (in Italian), published by Morcelliana Scholè (2022), and a columnist for the Italian national newspapers Huffington Post Italy and Sole 24 Ore. She is the author of scientific publications (in international journals such as the Russian Review and Cahiers du Monde Russe).

From 2016 to 2021 she was a regular contributor as a Russia expert to Oxford Analytica. The monograph she is working on analyses post-Soviet Russian diplomacy and regional ethnic conflicts since 1991 and is based on years of archival research and dozens of interviews with politicians and diplomats in Russia, the Caucasus, the Baltic States and the United States.