Ronald Linden Named Director of Pitt’s European Studies Center, European Union Center of Excellence

Ronald Linden

Ronald Linden, professor of political science in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Arts and Sciences, has been named director of Pitt’s European Studies Center and European Union Center of Excellence, effective immediately.

In announcing the appointment, Lawrence Feick, director of Pitt’s University Center for International Studies (UCIS), said, “Ron is a superb scholar who has a deep understanding of both Western and Eastern Europe. He brings wide-ranging and critically important experience to this position, including his previous time in UCIS as a very successful director of Russian and Eastern European Studies. Under Ron’s leadership, our programs and activities in European studies and European Union studies will continue to flourish, and we will enhance our position as one of the highest-impact programs in the world focused on this critical region.”

A Pitt faculty member since 1977, Linden has focused his research on Central and Southeastern Europe. He served as director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies from 1984 to 1989 and again from 1991 to 1998. From 1989 to 1991, he was director of research for Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany, where his responsibilities included supervision of the publication of the weekly Report on Eastern Europe.

Linden is the author or editor of seven books on Central and Eastern Europe, with another forthcoming. He has also published more than 25 articles and chapters since 1979. His most recent publications include introductions for and editing of two special issues of Problems of Post-Communism, “The Meaning of 1989 and After” (2009) and “The New Populism in Central and Southeast Europe” (2008). He is the author of “EU Accession and the Role of International Actors,” published in Central and East European Politics: From Communism to Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), and “The Burden of Belonging: Romanian and Bulgarian Foreign Policy in the New Era” (Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2009). He was also a contributing author to the volume The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the U.S. Department of State in 2009 to commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

During his career, Linden has served as a Fulbright Research Scholar and a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Yugoslavia, a research scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace under the Jennings Randolph Program on International Peace, and a guest scholar of the East European Studies Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In 2009-10, Linden was awarded a Transatlantic Academy Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C., where he was part of a project devoted to studying Turkish foreign policy. In addition, Linden has received research grants from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research and from the International Research and Exchanges Board.

Linden received his PhD in politics from Princeton University in 1976, his master’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 1971, and his bachelor’s degree in government from Boston University in 1969.