Prof. Thomas Sherlock

Thomas Sherlock is a professor of political science emeritus at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He received his doctorate in political science from Columbia University and has taught courses on comparative politics, international relations, democracy and democratization, comparative political institutions, international security, nationalism and populism, and the politics of the post-Soviet region. His book, Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, was published in an expanded, translated edition by Rosspen, a leading academic publisher in Russia. He is also the co-author of The Fight for Legitimacy: Democracy vs. Terrorism (with Cindy Jebb, Ruth Beitler, and Peter Liotta).

Thom has contributed chapters to several edited volumes and his articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Comparative Politics, Washington Quarterly, Problems of Communism, Ab Imperio, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, The Journal of Democracy, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Prepodavanie istorii i obshchestvovedeniia v shkole (Russia), Rossiia v global’noi politike (Russia), Valdai Discussion Club (Russia), and Tempus et Memoria (Russia). He has also written chapters for US Government White Papers on Russia (2016, 2019) and China (2019, with John Gregory) commissioned by the Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA, US Department of Defense) in its Future of Global Competition and Conflict project.

Thom’s opinion pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times (international edition), the Washington Post (the Monkey Cage) and other news outlets. He has given academic presentations at Yale, Columbia, and Wesleyan universities, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Ivan Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (Georgia), and other academic and public institutions.

Thom has conducted field work in numerous countries in post-Soviet space, including the supervision of focus groups in Moscow. His current projects examine the character of Russian and Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism, Russian elite and popular attitudes about great power identity, mass and elite assessments of Soviet history in post-Soviet societies, and the nature of xenophobia in Russia.