Welcome!

I'm Laura Howells, a PhD Candidate in Politics at Princeton University. I am a recipient of the Prize Fellowship in Social Sciences. 

My research focuses broadly on the attitudinal and behavioral ramifications of nation- and state-building policy. I also write on issues of authoritarianism, particularly in Russia.  

My dissertation project concerns how the state, majority, and minority individuals negotiate the process of nation-building, with Estonia's ongoing monolingual education reform at the core. This project brings together design-based causal inference with quantitative and qualitative description and draws on extended fieldwork. Get in touch here for the working paper or simply to discuss the project in more detail.

I hold an M.A. from Princeton and a dual B.A. (summa cum laude) from Bowdoin College in Comparative Politics and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Prior to Princeton, I conducted research in Estonia on a Fulbright scholarship and interned at The Moscow Times, one of Russia's few remaining independent news outlets.