Lily is a DPhil student at the Department of Politics and International Relations, specialising in authoritarian politics, environmental governance, and state-society relations, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. Her research explores how autocratic regimes maintain control and legitimacy among populations facing material, environmental, and political pressures, and how citizens experience and respond to these dynamics both within and beyond national borders. Her broader interest is in understanding how authoritarian regimes govern under constraint, and how ordinary citizens navigate and contest these forms of power.
Her doctoral research investigates how material environmental pressures, such as pollution and waste management crises, shape public opinion, protest, and regime stability in autocratic contexts, using mixed methods including survey experiments, protest-event data, and comparative analysis. In parallel, her work as a Research Associate for ACT-UK, a SALIENT Hub funded research project, analyses contemporary and historical patterns of transnational repression and the projection of state control abroad.
Prior to her DPhil, Lily obtained an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony's College, Oxford, where she wrote her Masters thesis under the supervision of Professor Paul Chaisty on environmental crises and elite blame avoidance. She spent a year living in Moscow, studying at Moscow State University during her undergraduate degree in Russian Studies and Politics at the University of Edinburgh.
Previously, Lily worked as an External Climate Risk Consultant for Danske Bank and as a Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Democracy, focusing on Russian foreign interference in East European countries and EU environmental policies and post-Covid National Recovery and Resilience Plans. During her Masters and in the early part of her DPhil, she also worked in academic conference organisation for the Europaeum and has provided research assistance for Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya's ESRC-funded research project on Non-Violent Repression in Electoral Autocracies. She is a Fellow of the University Consortium and a member of the Working Group on Climate Obstruction in Authoritarian and Non-Democratic States, part of Brown University's Climate Social Science Network.
Research
Lily's research interests include:
- Environmental Politics
- Protests and Contentious Politics
- Comparative Authoritarianism
- Executive Politics and Crisis Management
- Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)
- Public Opinion Research
- Blame Avoidance and Attribution
Teaching
- Politics of Russia and the former Soviet Union
Languages
- Russian (C1)
- Bulgarian (B1)
