Danielle Leavitt is a historian and writer covering modern Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Russian and Ukrainian relations, human age, generation, and gender. Leavitt’s first book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (2025, FSG), charted the lives of seven Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Based on a unique set of online diaries and in-depth interviews over many months, Leavitt braids together the experiences of her sources with essential historical context, grounding her finely-grained account of the war within the larger narrative of Ukraine’s history, identity, and relationship with Russia. A moving and eye-opening work of journalism and narrative nonfiction, By the Second Spring gives readers a vivid picture of everyday life in wartime Ukraine.
Leavitt received a bachelor’s degree in Russian and Women’s Studies from Brigham Young University in 2015. She received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2023. From 2023-2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is currently a fellow at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, Kramer Quist, and their two young daughters.