Walter Connor

Walter D. Connor teaches courses dealing with Russia, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. He currently chairs the Political Science Department, as he also did in 1987-92. He was the Director of Soviet and East European Studies at the Foreign Service Institute for the U.S. Department of State from 1976-84. Before that, he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1968-76. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Connor is the author of Deviance in Soviet Society (1972), Socialism, Politics and Equality (1979), Socialism’s Dilemmas (1988), The Accidental Proletariat (1991) and Tattered Banners: Labor, Conflict and Corporatism in Post-communist Russia (1996). He co-authored Public Opinion in European Socialist Systems (1977) and was co-editor and contributor to Soviet Social Problems (1991) and The Polish Road from Socialism (1992). He has received the Department of State’s Meritorious Honor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and various grants. He has served on the editorial boards of Studies in Comparative Communism, American Sociological Review and East European Politics and Societies and on the Board of Directors for the Boston World Affairs Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.