Leandra Bias
Biographie
Leandra Bias (she/her) joined the Department of European and Slavic Studies in September 2025 as a Senior Researcher (Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow). Previously, she held a postdoc position at the University of Bern, where she was also Co-PI in the Horizon project UNTWIST and at swisspeace (University of Basel), where she also acted as advisor for gender-sensitive peacebuilding. She is currently also affiliated with the Berlin-based Centre for East European and international studies (ZOiS).
Her research is centred around the question of how gender realtes to the causes, processes and effects of political violence and resistance to it. She studies this from various angles: from feminist civil society to political elites, from settings of negative peace to those of active warfare. Regionally, she specialises in Russia, Serbia and Ukraine, while methodologically she works with (interpretative) qualitative methods. She is co-founder of the Swiss-wide research network of Gender & Political Science. Leandra is also the recipient of the Young Scholar 2022 award in recognition of her science communication and she regularly acts as an advisor.
Leandra defended her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2020, which received the European Consortium for Political Research Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize 2023 for best thesis in Gender & Politics. Her first book "Under Authoritarian Eyes: Feminist Solidarity and Resistance in Russia and Serbia" is forthcoming in 2026 with Oxford University Press. During her DPhil she held four visiting fellowships, including at the Graduate Institute and the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in St. Petersburg.
Her five-year research project (940'500CHF) examines how, why and to what effect for local feminist civil society, Russian and Ukrainian elites instrumentalise gender to seek external legitimacy from their respective allies.