Professor Harald Wydra

Professor Harald Wydra is Henry Philpott College Professor in Politics, Director of Studies in HSPS, and Tutor. After studies of history and political science at the Universities of Regensburg and Salamanca, he took a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. He held visiting fellowships at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Australian National University in Canberra and was a Visiting Professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. His research interests include Eastern European and Russian politics, democracy (comparative and theory), political anthropology, religion and politics, politics of memory, interpretive methods in the social sciences. Major publications include Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (Palgrave 2001), Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2007), Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe (co-editor) (Routledge 2008), Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (co-editor) (Berghahn 2015), and Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge University Press 2015). He is currently editing a Handbook of Political Anthropology (Edward Elgar, forthcoming).

• Continuities in Poland's Permanent Transition (Palgrave 2001)
• Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge University Press, 2015)