Timothy M Frye

Welcome to my webpage. I am a professor of political science at Columbia University and the Director of the Harriman Institute. Thanks to a generous three-year grant from the Russian government, I am also the Director of the Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (CSID) at the Higher Economics School in Moscow. I received a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Middlebury College in 1986, an M.A. from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1997. My research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on Eurasia, including, Russia, Central Asia, and Europe. My most recent book is Building States and Markets After Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 was a awarded a best book prize for 2010 by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2010 Hewitt Prize for the best book published in political economy by Association of Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies. I have worked as a consultant for a number of organizations, including the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Bloomberg Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.