Rachel Epstein is a Professor of International Relations and European Politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. In addition, she is the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs and an affiliated faculty member with the Sie Cheou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy. She earned her MA and PhD from Cornell University’s Department of Government and her AB from Stanford University in International Relations. She specializes in international political economy, international security, and the role of international organizations in eliciting compliance from target states and states-in-transition. She has held two post-doctoral fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and was also an Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin in 2016.

She has published widely on subjects concerning European Union enlargement, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the developmental prospects of post-communist countries and the politics of finance, financial crisis and foreign bank ownership. She is the author of In Pursuit of Liberalism: International Institutions in Postcommunist Europe (Johns Hopkins 2008) and Banking on Markets: The Transformation of Bank-State Ties in Europe and Beyond (Oxford 2017),  for which she was awarded the Ed A. Hewett Book Award. She was a co-editor at the Review of International Political Economy from 2017 to 2020.