Sean Griffin is an Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of German and Russian at the University of Notre Dame.

His research focuses on the history of the Orthodox Church and its role in the sacralization of political power: from the liturgy and chronicles of medieval Kyiv to the arthouse cinema and wartime propaganda of Putin’s Russia.

Griffin’s first book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, was published with Cambridge University Press. It was the winner of two international book awards: the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize and the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize. His newest book, Putin’s Holy War: Sacred Memory and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, will be published with Cornell University Press.

Griffin completed his PhD in Slavic Studies at UCLA. Since then, his research has been supported by the VolkswagenStiftung, the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the ACLS-Luce Foundation, and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.