Dr. Mary Shiraef

Mary Shiraef joined the MZES as Lorenz-von-Stein Fellow in Research Department A in April 2024.

Mary received her PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame in August 2024. Her dissertation addressed the origins of variation in political identity within ethnic groups in the context of Albania’s nation-building and its communist-era policy towards the recognition of the Greek minority. Her data curation methods are mixed, combining archival and cemetery sources with survey data, interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observational data. 

During her PhD, she worked as an editorial research assistant for several projects, including the Review of Politics journal and Stanford University’s McCoy Center for Ethics book-writing workshops. She also founded the COVID Border Accountability Project, COBAP, a multilingual, international team that hand-coded and archived border policies implemented globally in response to COVID in 2020 and 2021 and provided public access to the data via an interactive website visualization (covidborderaccountability.org). 

As a course instructor, she has taught courses at the undergraduate level in introductory political science, ancient political thought, modern political thought (from Machiavelli to Nietzsche), and minority identity narratives. Furthermore, she has assisted with the teaching of comparative politics and pandemic politics. Her teaching interests include authoritarianism, immigration, and identity politics.
 
At the MZES, Mary will expand her dissertation research in its timeline to Albania’s post-communist context as well as its emigration contexts to Greece, Italy, and Germany--and the comparative dynamics of diaspora politics across these three EU countries. She is interested in collaborating with researchers who have linguistic experience or project interest in Balkan countries, post-communist contexts, immigration, or identity.