Welcome Kyle!

Kyle Marquardt joined the department as an associate professor in April 2022.  He was previously an assistant professor at HSE University in Moscow, Russia (2019-2022); and a research fellow at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden (2015-2022). He received his PhD (2015) and MA (2010) in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, preceded by an MA in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia from Harvard University (2009) and a BA in German from Grinnell College (2005).    

Kyle has two main areas of research. In the first, he studies the relationship between language, identity and separatism in the former Soviet Union. This research involves both quantitative analysis of survey and event count data, as well as qualitative case studies. As part of of this research, he has conducted field research in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Turkmenistan.

In his second line of research, Kyle investigates the advantages and disadvantages of using experts to code important social scientific concepts. This work builds directly on his experiences working at the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, a large-scale data-gathering enterprise that uses experts to measure political institutions around the world, covering most countries from 1789 to present. Kyle is currently a V-Dem Project Manager for Measurement and Methods, and is working on a book with Daniel Pemstein (North Dakota State University) and Brigitte Seim (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) that applies lessons learned from the V-Dem Project to other contexts.