Virginia Martin, PhD

Dr. Virginia (Ginny) Martin is the IPO Interim Director (August 2024–present). From 2011 through 2024, Virginia was partnership coordinator, with primary focus on the UW Partnership with Nazarbayev University as well as coordination/management responsibility for the American Councils Higher Education Capacity Building Project with six universities in Kazakhstan (2023) and the UW–Madison collaboration with the Tashkent Chemical Technological Institute in 2020–21, among others. Before working at UW–Madison, she was an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she taught for 10 years. Virginia has a PhD in History (1996) from the University of Southern California and is an active scholar with specialization in the 19th century political and socio-cultural history of the Kazakh steppe.