Joanna Regulska

Joanna Regulska is a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. She currently serves as Vice Provost and Associate Chancellor, Global Affairs. Her research concentrates on women’s agency, political activism, grassroots mobilization, and the construction of women’s political spaces, with a focus on Europe and the Caucasus. Over the last twenty-five years she has worked with many non-governmental organizations in central and east Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia on questions of citizen’s political participation, self-governance, and women’s rights.

She has also conducted extensive work on the impacts of political and economic restructuring on the process of democratization and decentralization. Most recently, her multi-year NSF-funded research examined everyday practices and livelihood strategies of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia.

She is the author or co-author of over 90 articles and reports, and of five books, including most recently Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union with Bonnie E. Smith (Routledge, 2012). Her research and policy work has been supported, by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Mellon Foundation ($9 million). She is a member of numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe.

For her contributions to the development of local democracy, local government reforms, and empowerment of women in public life she was in 2004 awarded by the President of Poland the Knight Cross of the Order of Restitution of the Republic of Poland and in 2014 the Commander Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 2011 she received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Tbilisi State University, Georgia.