Sean Griffin is Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies 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 newest book, The Patriarch’s War: Kirill Gundiaev and the Forty-Year Battle for Ukraine, traces the history of modern Russian Orthodoxy through the life and career of the Church’s powerful and polarizing current leader. It uncovers the conflict’s deep religious origins and reveals how Patriarch Kirill has wielded sacred memory to recast Putin’s brutal invasion as a holy war. The study — part intellectual biography, part political drama — offers the first full account of how Kirill has taken the figures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and fashioned from them gods of war.

Griffin’s first book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, was published with Cambridge University Press. The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. The study analyzes how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. The Liturgical Past was the winner of two international book awards: the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize and the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize.

Griffin completed his PhD in Slavic Studies at UCLA. His research has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the ACLS-Luce Foundation, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.