Welcome to my website!

I am a Visiting Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, working at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and economic theory.

At its core, my research asks two fundamental questions: who rules, and who rebels? I study the political economy of authoritarianism, regime change, and revolution — how autocracies entrench, and how they break — examining how regimes engineer mass consent, how elites survive institutional shocks, how revolutionary networks mobilize, and how state coercion shapes electoral choice.

To answer these questions, I build large-scale, individual-level data from unstructured archival text. By combining these novel data pipelines with causal inference and formal modeling, I analyze the mechanics of regime survival—specifically, when institutional reforms pacify dissent and when they instead reorganize opposition.

My regional focus spans Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia, with particular focus on the Russian Empire, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic. I hold a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin (2023) and completed postdoctoral research at Trinity College Dublin (2023–2025).

I am a member of the Network Against Abuse of Power in Science (MAWI) and the Women in Economic History (WIEH) Initiative.

I'd love to hear from you: julia.zimmermann@uc3m.es.