Fellows
Evan Alterman
Evan Alterman is a PhD candidate in Slavic languages and literatures at Stanford University. His dissertation is a study of imperial images and narratives contained in travelogues written about and between the late Russian/Ottoman Empires and early Soviet Union/Turkish Republic. Other research interests include the figure of the Istanbul-based Soviet exile in Russophone and Turkish literature; Volga Tatar intellectual and literary history; the aesthetics of ethnography and folklore; queer readings of Russophone literature (the Freemasons of Novikov, Tolstoy, Pisemskii, and Kuzmin; Kuzmin’s ghazals) ; depictions of Anatolia in Turkish, Russophone, and Armenian literatures; intertexts from Russophone literature in the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan; and thematic and formal affinities between Anton Chekhov and Sait Faik Abasıyanık.
Sophie Bryant
Sophie Bryant is a first-year MPhil student in Global and Area Studies at Merton College, Oxford. Originally from Moscow, she lived in Shanghai for five years before moving to the Adirondacks. She holds a BA from Columbia University in East Asian studies and mathematics and has conducted research at various think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and Carnegie China. Her current research examines how Soviet-era infrastructural legacies, environmental subjectivity, and Kazakh nationalism inform public sentiment toward Chinese private and public sector involvement in Kazakhstan.
Pavel Devyatkin
Pavel Devyatkin is a Senior Associate at The Arctic Institute (Washington DC) and a PhD Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at HSE University (Moscow). His research areas include Russian Arctic policy, Arctic security and diplomacy, and US-Russia-China relations. Pavel’s research has been published by the US Department of Defense, Polar Journal, Rossiyskaya Arktika, ISPI, and others. He has been invited to present at academic events organized by the Arctic Council, US Embassy in Moscow, Ocean University of China, MGIMO, IISS, and others. Pavel is a graduate of UCL and LSE. He was a researcher at the Stanford US-Russia Forum and the United Nations (UNCCD). Based in Moscow, Pavel is an American of Russian ancestry.
Helene Gusman
Helene Gusman is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), earning an MA in International Affairs in May 2023. While at SAIS, she specialized in Russian and sub-Saharan African foreign policy. For her thesis, Helene developed a comprehensive framework for identifying at-risk countries, focusing on the Wagner Group’s role in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to SAIS, she graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in International and Global Studies, specializing in Russia and Eastern Europe. In college she spent a year living in Yaroslavl, and has also lived in Finland, Germany, France, South Africa, Italy, and the United States. Helene is a native French speaker, and speaks Russian, Italian, and German to varying degrees of proficiency. She has accepted a traineeship with NATO SHAPE in Belgium.
Renny Hahamovitch
Renny Hahamovitch is a PhD Candidate in History and Science & Technology Studies at the University of Michigan. His dissertation is a comparative history of the Soviet and American space industries, looking at the parallel rise and fall of the both space programs during the 1960s and 70s. In particular, he is interested in how the future of the Space Age helped organize the political economy of the space industries, determine the trajectory of technological development, and shape the role of space technology in Soviet and American society. Before Michigan, he received an MA in history from Central European University in Budapest and a BA in English from the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Currently he is based in Chicago.
Sofia Johanson
Sofia Johanson is an MSc student in Russian and East European Studies at University College, Oxford. Her thesis is on the coverage of the Central African Republic by RT en français, the state-controlled platform’s French-language outlet. Prior to this, she obtained a BA in Russian and Spanish from Trinity College, Cambridge, which included a placement with the Basque regional government in San Sebastián. During her time there, she worked on an EU-funded cultural project involving eighteen ‘city-partners’ across Europe, as well as on the organisation and running of an international conference on public, cultural and digital diplomacy. Sofia has covered international stories for The Times, including the rise in state investment in the Russian Far East’s tourism industry, and interviewed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk for Oxford’s university newspaper. Whilst at Cambridge, she was editor of the Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia Section of the Cambridge Language Collective, commissioning, editing and writing on topics including overlooked Polish artists, expat life in Kazakhstan, and the role of the Russian mother in the conflicts in Chechnya and Ukraine.
Hilary Lynd
Hilary Lynd is a historian of the former Soviet Union and South Africa. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, she is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. Previously, she studied at Brown University and the University of Edinburgh. Hilary’s research takes comparative and transnational approaches to questions of empire, decolonization, and the governance of difference. She has published articles about blackness and Africanness in the Soviet Union, as well as the secret land deal that convinced a Zulu nationalist party to set aside its threat to boycott South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Adrien Mercat
Adrien Mercat is a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. He studies the South Caucasus in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His interest lies in studying the intellectual milieu in which ideas of national consciousness emerged and how they were shaped by the multiethnic fabric of the city of Tbilisi. Prior to Princeton, Adrien earned a B.A. in Political Science and Russian from McGill University and a M.A. in Regional Studies: Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe from Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. His research languages include French, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani and Turkish, both modern and Ottoman.
Natalie Navarrete
Natalie Navarrete is a first-year MPhil student and Rhodes Scholar studying Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the construction of Kazakhstan’s transnational paradigm of state identity around the country’s founding “nuclear myths” under Presidents Nazarbayev and Tokaev. In addition to her degrees in International Affairs, Spanish, and Russian from the University of Georgia, she participated in the Russian Flagship Program and completed her Capstone year at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. She participated in intensive Russian language studies, interned as a translator, and conducted research on Kazakh national identity while in Almaty. Natalie is also interested in nuclear nonproliferation policy in Central Asia and researched this topic as an intern at the US Department of Energy. In the summer of 2023, she conducted research on the impact of the war in Ukraine on nuclear disarmament discourse as a Summer Fellow for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Education and Research Center.
Jonathan Raspe
Jonathan Raspe is a PhD candidate in Russian, East European, and Central Asian history at Princeton University. His dissertation explores the intersection of industrialization and nation-building in the Soviet Union’s national republics after the Second World War. His published work focuses on ethnic relations, national identity, and Jewish history in interwar Ukraine and Belarus. Before coming to Princeton, he received an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies with Distinction from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and a BA in History and Economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Abigail Schoenfeld
Abigail Schoenfeld is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Her research deals with the transnational mobilization of social sciences in nation-building projects between Turkey and Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s and ‘30s. By examining exchanges between Turkish and Soviet scholars of linguistics, history, archaeology, and physical anthropology, her dissertation aims to shed light on the ways in which transnational intellectual currents influence national movements. She holds a MA from Columbia University and an MSc from the London School of Economics & Political Sciences, both in history, as well as a BA in political science from Barnard College. Her research languages include Turkish (modern and Ottoman), Azerbaijani, French, Russian, and limited Persian, and she has conducted research in archives and libraries in Baku, Ankara, and Istanbul.
Kyle Tucker
Kyle Tucker is a 2024 Marshall Scholar and incoming graduate student pursuing an MA in National Security Studies at King’s College London. He recently finished a Scoville Peace Fellowship, where he worked on nuclear security issues in Washington, DC at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Tucker is a graduate of Indiana University, where he obtained bachelor’s degrees in International Studies and Russian. While at university, Tucker studied the Russian language through the U.S. Department of Defense Russian Flagship Program. On a Boren Scholarship, he then lived for nine months in Almaty, Kazakhstan. His research focuses on the nuclear legacies of the Cold War, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union, and on Cooperative Threat Reduction as a tool for international partnership and nonproliferation.
Yipeng Zhou
Yipeng Zhou is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current scholarly interests revolve around the history of mining in Central Eurasia, with a focus on the political, socioeconomic, environmental, and public health implications of resource extraction on the region and beyond. In addition to his scholarly research, Yipeng actively promotes and engages in digital scholarship. He is dedicated to building open-access information spaces and has contributed to several open-access digital resources, including the Digital Handbook for Research on Soviet History and Fontes: Open Access Sources for Ukrainian History.