Sierra Nota

Sierra Nota is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Russian and East European History at Stanford University. In 2023-24, she is a pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, where she coordinates the Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum (SURF). 

Her dissertation project, “Expropriating Ukraine: State Property Regimes from the Russian Empire to the Maidan,” explores the relationship between Mezhyhirya, a land parcel north of Kyiv, and the regimes that possessed it from 1786 to 2014. Using archival material in five languages across four centuries, she studies how Ukrainian land was possessed, used, and transformed by autocratic regimes from Catherine the Great to Viktor Yanukovych. 

She has also conducted archival research on Russia’s institutional soft power, Siberian city planning, and the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine. Before Stanford, Sierra received her BA, summa cum laude, from Harvard University.