Profile at home institution
Duration of Stay: 31 May - 19 June 2026 | Visiting Fellow based at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Landshuter Str. 4
Talk as part of the 2026 LSC annual conference: Civic horizons: Citizen-diplomacy and Transnational Mutuality in an Age of Great Power Rivalries - Panel 2 | 18 June, 11:00-12:30 | Institutionalizing Independence and Interdependence

Keith Brown is the Director of the Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. During 2021-22 he was on research leave as a Core Fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and a BA in classics from Oxford University. His work focuses on history, culture and politics in the Western Balkans, with a particular emphasis on 20th century Macedonia. He has spent extended time in the region, and his published works include The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia  (Indiana University Press, 2013). Since joining ASU in 2017, Keith has extended the Melikian Center's collaborations, including strengthening university partnerships in North Macedonia, Armenia and Kazakhstan.

He has also pursued collaboration across scholarly and professional boundaries in research on civil and military forms of international intervention, especially in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. This has produced edited volumes focused on democracy promotion (Transacting Transition, 2006) and comparative approaches to post-conflict studies (Post-Conflict Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach, 2015; co-edited with Chip Gagnon). He continues to work on research to locate the Western Balkans in larger global contexts, with a focus on the significance and legacy of grass-roots social and political movements for community memory and regime change.