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Ruxandra Paul is a Ph.D. candidate in the Government Department at Harvard University and a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Her dissertation examines the socio-political consequences of contemporary transnational migrations in the context of the enlarging European Union. Combining extensive qualitative and quantitative data, this interdisciplinary project identifies and analyzes the impact that the increasingly common European trans-state labor mobilities has on political systems and on the relationship between sending states and their citizens. Paul refers to these dramatic political evolutions in the migrants' countries of origin as political remittances.

As a Chateaubriand Fellow of the French government, Paul spent the academic year 2009-2010 at the Institut d'Études Politiques - Sciences Po, Paris (Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales - CERI). Her field research in Italy, Romania and Poland has been supported by a Krupp Foundation grant of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, as well as by the Weatherhead Center.

A Graduate Student Associate of the Center for European Studies, Paul received her MA from Harvard in 2008. She is a proud graduate of Williams College (summa cum laude, with highest honors in Political Science) where she majored in International Relations and French Language and Literature. She spent a year at Oxford University, U.K., researching the effects of EU enlargement on European integration. As a Ruchman Fellow, she worked on another ample project that studied the nature of the EU as a geo-political entity, by comparing the EU with other geo-political structures, past and present.

At Harvard, Paul served as Vice-President and At-Large Representative for Social Sciences on the Graduate Student Council. She worked as a Resident Adviser and social coordinator for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Currently she is the Adviser to the Graduate Student Council and serves on the organizing committee of the university-wide Harvard Leadership Conference: Collaborating for Change 2011. 

A fervent advocate for innovative teaching and technology use to boost learning experiences in and outside the classroom, Paul was selected upon nomination by the Government Department as one of the 15 participants to the inaugural Teagle Seminar: Designing the Course of the Future, organized by Harvard's Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. As a teaching fellow at Harvard College, she taught courses in Comparative Institutional Design, Introduction to Comparative Politics, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, the Politics of the European Union. Paul has advised senior theses in the Government Department and in Social Studies. Since 2010, when she was nominated by Harvard undergraduates, she has served on the Board of Freshmen Advisers. She is a recipient of the Certificate of Excellence in Teaching awarded by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard.

Research interests: the European Union, international migration, transnationalism, political behavior, political socialization, citizenship and identity, democratic transitions, communism and post-communism, civil society, state-building, comparative institutional design

For more info, please visit: http://scholar.harvard.edu/ruxandra_paul/