Susan L. Woodward is an expert on Balkan, East European, and post-Soviet affairs, on intervention in civil wars, and on peacebuilding and post-conflict statebuilding and reconstruction. She is the author of Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (1995), selected a Choice “Outstanding Academic Book 1995” and Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (1995), winner of the 1996 Hewett Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and numerous articles on southeastern Europe, the post-communist transition in eastern Europe, state failure, peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction, and the relation between development and security.
 
Woodward, who holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, came to the Graduate Center in January 2001 from King’s College, University of London, where she was a senior research fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies. From 1990 to 1999, she served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where she also taught graduate seminars at Georgetown, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Before that she held positions in political science on the faculties of Yale University (1982–89), Williams College (1978–82), Mount Holyoke College (1977–78), and Northwestern University (1972–77). In 1994, she was head of the analysis and assessment unit in the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), and in the 1998 election period, she was a special advisor to the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 2010 to 2013, she was a member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration.