Welcome to my website! My name is Estelle E. Brun and I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Boston University (BU). I specialize in Comparative Politics and Political Theory and my research focuses on the interactions between electoral politics and the politics of memory.
In my dissertation, I investigate the relationship between political behavior and institutional memory in advanced democratic regimes, and I specifically seek to understand how and why political and cultural elites develop different discourses about the past in the context of “memory battles” (public debates about historical narratives) by combining qualitative (elite interviews, ethnography) and survey methods (survey experiment). In this project, I adopt a transatlantic and sub-national perspective through the cases of South Carolina (United States) and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Southeastern France).
In addition to the politics of memory, I am also interested in politics in nominally non-political spaces. These side projects have focused on the Eurovision Song Contest, football politics, and sports diplomacy. They fall under the broader topic of “culture wars,” which I study through various epistemological approaches. My research is published in French Politics and European Political Science Review (forthcoming).
I have been a teaching fellow for political theory and comparative politics courses at BU as well as the instructor of record for the Introduction to Comparative Politics course in the summer of 2025. In the spring of 2027, I will teach a graduate-level seminar on European Politics and Culture.
Prior to joining Boston University, I obtained a Master of Science in Comparative Politics with Distinction from the London School of Economics (LSE) and worked for two years at the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS), a Paris-based think tank.
