Ronald Suny is director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and emeritus professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago.

He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan. He taught history at Oberlin College in the 1970s.

Suny was born in Philadelphia, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962, and earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1968. His fields of study are the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; nationalism; ethnic conflict; the role of emotions in politics; South Caucasus; and Russian/Soviet historiography.^[3]