Dr. Olga Onuch (DPhil, Oxford), is an Associate Professor in Politics [Senior Lecturer] at the University of Manchester and is was until recently an Associate Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, at the University of Oxford (2014-2020). She is the winner of the 2017 Political Studies Association National Sir Bernard Crick Award for Outstanding Teaching.
From January 2019 she is the PhD Director at the Politics Department. Between 2015-2019 Onuch was the Chair of Comparative Public Policy and Institutions Research Cluster and remains an active member of the Democracy and Elections Research Cluster.
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In 2017, Onuch was a Research Fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard University. In 2014-2015, Onuch was Co-PI (with Hale, Colton, Kravets) of a National Science Foundation-funded study of Ukrainian political opinion (Ukraine Crisis Election Panel Survey). In 2014 she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship Grant (awarded to “exceptional and promising young scholars”). In 2013/2014, Onuch was a Shklar Research Fellow, at HURI, at Harvard University. From 2011 to 2014 Onuch was a Research Fellow (in Politics), at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where she held the prestigious Newton Fellowship Award and was PI of the Ukrainian Protest Project: Comparative Protest Politics funded by the British Academy.
Previously, Onuch held the post of Petro Jacyk Prize Fellow, at CERES, at the Munk School of Global Affairs, at the University of Toronto (where she worked with Jeffrey Kopstein, Peter Solomon and Lucan Way). In 2008-2009 (and again in 2013) she was a Visiting Fellow at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires, Argentina (where she worked with Enrique Peruzzotti and Guillermo O’Donnell).
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Onuch holds a DPhil in Politics (2010), from the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR), at the University of Oxford (Oxford, UK). Her doctoral research focused on social mobilization, protest, elections and the role of the media in democratizing states in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Her thesis on mass-mobilization in Ukraine (2004) & Argentina (2001) was supervised by Gwendolyn Sasse and Laurence Whitehead (advisor) and awarded with high praise and no corrections. Nancy Bermeo and Mark Beissinger were on her Viva examination committee. She was awarded a Neporany Doctoral Prize.
Onuch holds a Master of Sciences in Comparative Politics (2006) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK). Her MSc thesis is entitled: “The Dynamics of ‘Exit’ and ‘Voice’: Causes and Growth of the Informal Sector (‘exit’) and its Relationship to Collective Political Participation (‘voice’) in the Case of Informal Workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Kyiv, Ukraine.”
Onuch received her first degree, B.A. Honours (2005) with a double major in Political Studies and International Development Studies, from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada). She was awarded the Viapond Award for excellence in Development Studies.