Feruza Aripova is a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She holds her Ph.D. in World History from Northeastern University. Her research and teaching focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian and Soviet history, with a regional focus on Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Her current book project, Fifty Shades of Vice: Decolonizing the Soviet Homophobic Legacy, looks at the lasting impact of Bolshevik sexual politics in the metropole vs. the periphery—particularly the Uzbek SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic)—and inconsistencies in same-sex discourses in Russia and its former imperial borderlands, e.g. the Baltic republics. It further examines the complex historical roots of contemporary homophobia in Russia and the post-Soviet spaces that developed as the result of colonial, political, and ideological continuities.

She is the author of “Tracing the Effects of Soviet Gender and Sexual Politics in Central Asia,” published in Central Asian Affairs (2022). Her article on “Queering the Soviet Pribaltika: Criminal cases of consensual sodomy in Soviet Latvia (1960s-1980s)” was published as a part of Decolonizing Queer Experience LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia, an anthology published in 2020. She is also a co-author of "The Ukrainian-Russian Virtual Flashmob against Sexual Assault" with Janet Johnson, published in The Journal of Social Policy Studies (2018).

Feruza Aripova developed and taught undergraduate courses, ranging from the survey course on the U.S. foreign policy to historical and political development in the world since 1945, which includes a comprehensive understanding of America’s global role and its diplomatic strategies to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union at Lehman College, CUNY, MIT and Northeastern University. She also designed and executed two short-term study abroad programs to the Baltic states and Russia in partnership with the Global Experience Office at Northeastern University.