Dr Marnie Howlett
Departmental Lecturer in Russian and East European Politics, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies & Department of Politics and International Relations
About
Dr Marnie Howlett is a Departmental Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Associate Member at Nuffield College. She teaches on the postgraduate Russian and Eastern European Studies, Comparative Government, and Qualitative Methods in Political Science courses.
Dr Howlett's research lies at the nexus of geopolitics, cartography, borders and nationalism within the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the country analysing the role of borders in shaping grassroots dynamics. She has worked on several projects related to nationalism, territoriality and sovereignty in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.
She has recently finished a book exploring the intersection and overlap of imagined and territorial cartographies for contemporary politics. She is currently working on a second book about why ordinary Ukrainians volunteered to defend their state after Russia's 2022 invasion. Her research interests also include qualitative methodologies, visual and digital methods, and ethics in political science research.
Dr Howlett holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), as well as a BA (High Honours) in International Studies and MA in Political Science from the University of Saskatchewan.
Expertise
- Contemporary Ukrainian geopolitics
- Ukrainian nationalism and ethnicity
- Borders and borderland areas
- War outcomes
- International relations and security in the former Soviet Union
Selected publications
- Reframing Reflexivity: Collaborative Ethics, Collective Responsibility, and Learnings from Researching Russia’s War against Ukraine (2025)
- Sheltering the Nation: The Politicisation of Ukraine’s Civilian Shelters Amidst Russia’s Aggression (2025)
- Losing and finding home twice: Ukrainian women’s experiences of secondary internal displacement (2025)
- At Any Cost: How Ukrainians Think about Self-Defense Against Russia (2023)
- The Russia-Ukraine crisis reminds us that the absence of war is not always peace (2022)
- Why Visuals Matter for the Politics of Migration—Particularly Now (2022)
- Looking at the ‘field’ through a Zoom lens: Methodological reflections on conducting online research during a global pandemic (2021)
- Playing Near the Edge: An Analysis of Ukrainian Border Youths’ Engagement with the Euromaidan (2020)
Media experience
Dr Marnie Howlett has worked extensively with media including live television and radio, as well as for print and other news sources, and in many countries including Canada, the UK, Ukraine and Malaysia.
Recent media work
- Experts with Prairie roots surprised by speed of attack on Ukraine, but not by resistance to it (CBC, 2022)
- Consider This: Ukraine (Part 2) - Territory & Sovereignty (Astro AWANI Network, 2022)
- The Russia-Ukraine conflict and Malaysia (The Star, 2022)
- University of Oxford researcher explains the dynamics of Ukraine-Russia relations (CBC/Radio-Canada, 2022)
Languages
English, Ukrainian, Russian