Welcome! Вітаю! Willkommen! 

I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where I'm also pursuing an MS in Applied Statistics. I'm a comparative politics scholar with a minor in methodology. Before coming to Northwestern, I studied English and German in Ukraine and then earned my BA and MA in Political Science in Germany, including a graduate exchange year at Duke University. 

I study how armed conflict leaves lasting marks on societies, in particular how wartime experiences shape political behavior, attitudes, and identities. Tracing these effects at the micro level, I link the outcomes to bigger questions of how states are built and rebuilt after war and whether and how postwar societies democratize. More broadly, I'm interested in the relationship between violence and political order in interstate and civil wars and state-building.

My dissertation asks how war transforms national communities from below. Studying the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, I show that wartime victimization strengthens national identity, that unequal sacrifice redraws the boundaries of the national in-group, and that these shifts can spark grassroots action that later shapes institutions. I conceptualize wartime contribution as a central mechanism that operates horizontally, through which unequal burdens and demands of war become a new basis for national belonging and political authority. I compile original national datasets and combine quantitative causal approaches with insights from extensive fieldwork in a mixed-methods design.

Along my scholarly journey, I've constructed and coded large-scale original datasets, developed codebooks and coding protocols, and collaborated and published with colleagues across disciplines. My research has been supported by Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Program in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies (REEES), and the Department of Political Science at NU.

When I'm not working, you'll find me walking along Lake Michigan, learning random tidbits of Franconian history (Allmächd!), serving my cat, or adding to my collection of wonderfully odd Ukrainian place names, a hobby I picked up during long geocoding evenings. My personal favorites include Медвеже Вушко (Bear's Little Ear), Великі Пузирики (Big Bubbles), Скаржинці (Complainersville), and Видумка (Figment). 

You can reach me at neonila.glukhodid@u.northwestern.edu.