Dr. Tesser is an Associate Professor of International Relations with expertise at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations, and history. Her early research analyzed the impact of international institutions' efforts to advance a cosmopolitan variant of liberalism in East-Central European societies lacking broad support for all liberal and border-effacing reforms required for joining the European Union. Fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, Social Science Research Council, among others, funded this research. Her first book Ethnic Cleansing and the European Union (Palgrave 2013) explains why EU enlargement may intensify nationalist politics. Prof. Tesser’s second book Rethinking the End of Empire (Stanford 2024) brings the vast body of recent historiography on modern empires to studies of nationalism, state proliferation, and international order to offer a fresh look at why nation-states eventually replaced empires.
During her career, Prof. Tesser has been affiliated with universities in Italy, Finland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Poland, and the U.S. She was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute (2019), a Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies (2011), and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the International University of Sarajevo (2008-10) as well as at the American University, Girne-Cyprus (2011-12). Dr. Tesser also taught at American University’s School of International Service (2004-05) and Loyola University Chicago (2003-04) after serving as a SSRC Berlin Program Fellow at the Free University of Berlin (2001-02), a non-resident Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of World Politics (2001-02), a CASPIC MacArthur Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago (2000-01), a DDRA Fulbright Scholar at Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz University (1999-2000), and won a Grodzins Prize Lectureship at the University of Chicago (2002). She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Reed College.