Cheng Chen is associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Her research and teaching interests include post-communist politics, nationalism and nation-building, democratization, Chinese politics, and comparative-historical methodology. She is the author of The Prospects for Liberal Nationalism in Post-Leninist States (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007) as well as many journal articles. Currently, she is working on a new book project examining the search for regime ideology in post-communist China and Russia.