Juliana Geran Pilon, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor
Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is Research Professor of Politics and Culture and Earhart Fellow at the Institute of World Politics. Her latest books are Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and the co-edited, with Richard Soudriette, Every Vote Counts: The Role of Elections in Building Democracy (University Press of America, 2007).
From 2003 to 2005, she taught in the Political Science Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. From January 1991 to October 2002, she was first Director of Programs, Vice President for Programs, and finally Senior Advisor for Civil Society at the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), after three years at the National Forum Foundation, a non-profit institution that focused on foreign policy issues (now part of Freedom House) where she was first Executive Director and then Vice President. At NFF, she assisted in creating a network of several hundred young political activists in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the past two decades she has also taught at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and American University, in addition to the Institute of World Politics.
From 1981 to 1988, she was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, writing on the United Nations, Soviet active measures, terrorism, East-West trade, and other international issues. In 1991, she received an Earhart Foundation fellowship for her second book, The Bloody Flag: Post-Communist Nationalism in Eastern Europe -- Spotlight on Romania, published by Transaction, Rutgers University Press. A native of Romania who speaks French, Romanian and Hungarian, Dr. Pilon came to the U.S. after a seventeen-year attempt to emigrate. She studied philosophy at Princeton University and the University of Chicago where she received her Ph.D. in 1974. She has taught at Emory University, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and Roosevelt University, then held post-doctoral fellowships at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and at the Institute of Humane Studies. She is the author of some 200 articles and reviews, and several monographs on East-West affairs. She has been interviewed extensively on television and radio -- CBS, ABC, CNN, CBN, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and NPR - has testified before Congress on many occasions, and has addressed many groups in the U.S. and abroad.
