Chip Gagnon

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Chip Gagnon is an Associate Professor of Politics and is currently serving as Chair of the Politics Department.  His specialty is international relations and comparative politics, with a regional focus on the former Yugoslavia and Russia.

He is the author of the book The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, which won the American Political Science Association's Prize for the Best Book on European Politics and Society as well as the Best First Book Award of the Council for European Studies.  He has also published numerous scholarly articles on topics related to the Yugoslav wars, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and multiculturalism in the Balkans in journals such as International Security, Foreign Affairs, and Journal of Democracy.

His research interests include ethnic and nationalist conflict, the phenomenon of political demobilization, democracy promotion, and post-conflict societies. His current research project focuses on US democracy assistance in the post-war Balkans.  He is also working with anthropologist Stefan Senders on a multi-year project, "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Post-Conflict Studies," based at the Peace Studies Program of Cornell University.

Gagnon teaches the department's Introduction to International Relations course, as well as upper level courses on Russian politics, nationalism and ethnic conflict, global migration, whiteness and multiculturalism, and democracy assistance.

Prior to coming to Ithaca College, Gagnon was awarded a 3 year SSRC-MacArthur postdoctoral fellowship during which he was in residence at the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University; during that period he also spent an academic year at the Dept of Sociology of the University of Zagreb (Croatia) and at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade (Serbia).  He has participated as organizer or presenter in summer schools in Niš (Serbia) and Ohrid (Macedonia), and was part of the research team for the Muabet  project of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He has travelled to Russia and to the former Yugoslavia numerous times.

Gagnon received his Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and his Ph.D. in political science, with a focus on international relations, from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University. He also earned certificates in East European Studies and  Russian and Soviet Studies at Columbia.

Gagnon and his family have lived in Ithaca for 16 years. He has a college-aged daughter and a high-school aged son. He is an avid cyclist.

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