Natasha Roy

Natasha Roy is a student in the M.A. in European and Russian Studies at Yale University, where she focuses on contemporary Russia. Most recently, she has been interning at The Moscow Times, the oldest independent English-language news outlet focused on Russia.

Natasha’s research interests span democratic theory, democratization and depoliticization in post-Soviet Russia, and the intellectual history of the post-Soviet space. At Yale, she plans to research depoliticization and resistance in Russia since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. She holds an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. Her MSc dissertation was titled “Capitalism and Unfreedom: Democratic Pessimism in postsocialist Russia,” and received a Distinction under the supervision of political theorist Lea Ypi. It explored how discourses of freedom transformed at the end of state socialism and during the “shock therapy” period of the 1990s.

Previously, Natasha received a BA in English Literature (High Honors) and Politics (Honors) from New York University, where she was a Presidential Honors Scholar. At NYU, her BA Honors thesis in English Literature explored the debates surrounding literary modernism within the Soviet literary establishment of the 1930s-1950s. It received a Summa Cum Laude and won two NYU departmental prizes.