Professor Tomila Lankina FBA

Summary

Tomila Lankina is Professor at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s and Balliol Colleges) in 2001, an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in America in 1995, and a BA in linguistics (Urdu and Hindi) from the Tashkent Institute of Oriental Studies in Uzbekistan in 1993.

She has held research appointments at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and De Montfort University in Leicester. In 2025, she received the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellowship, and the Einstein Visiting Fellowship at the Excellence Cluster SCRIPTS at Freie Universität Berlin.

At the outbreak of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Professor Lankina helped set up together with other LSE colleagues an informal LSE Taskforce to support students from Ukraine. In 2025, she volunteered to teach a course on politics at the Kyiv School of Economics to support the resilience of Ukraine’s academic community in wartime.

She has published several books and dozens of papers on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests, social inequality, and propaganda and misinformation in Russia and other countries.

Her last book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press 2022) has won the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association; the Davis Center Book Prize, sponsored by Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies; and “Honourable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.

She is also a recipient of awards for Excellence in Education at LSE.