Elena Gadjanova is a member of Associate Faculty at the School. These are former members of faculty who retain a link to the School.

Elena Gadjanova is an Assistant Professor in Politics at the University of Exeter. Previously she was a Departmental Lecturer in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and an associate member of Nuffield College. She studies political communication, public opinion, and electoral politics in new democracies, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. She is committed to understanding the challenges to good governance in diverse societies with a view to designing policies and putting in place incentives to help overcome these challenges. 

Prior to joining the Blavatnik School, Elena was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, Fung Global Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Institute and an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge.