Dr. Jeffrey Kopstein

Professional Background

Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.  Previously, he held faculty appointments at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Toronto, where he was director of the Centre for Jewish Studies. The author of two books, three edited volumes, and over sixty peer reviewed articles, Kopstein’s work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust.  He has held fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard University, Princeton University, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history.  These interests are central topics in his latest monograph (with Jason Wittenberg), Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2018), which examined a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The study sought to explain why pogroms occurred in some localities and not in others. His forthcoming edited volume (with Jelena Subotić and Susan Welch), Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2022), resulted from an international collaborative project using new sources, data, and methods in Holocaust research.  

Fellowship Research

Professor Kopstein was awarded the 2021-2022 Ina Levine Invitational Fellowship to continue his research on social scientific approaches to the Holocaust.  During his fellowship he will work on his new book, Three Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence from Antiquity to the Holocaust, a close comparative study of three communities that fell victim to deadly riots in different eras and under significantly different international orders and cultural contexts. The book explores the continuities and changes in the sources, meaning, and processes of exclusionary violence over the past two millennia.                

Residency Period: September 1, 2021, through March 31, 2022