Fellows

Daniel Berardino 

Daniel Berardino is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in Eastern European and Russian history. A cultural historian of nationalism and religion, Daniel studied Byzantine and Medieval history before coming to Berkeley, receiving his MA in Medieval Studies from Fordham University. At Fordham, Daniel focused primarily on Byzantium’s interactions with Western Europe in the crusading period. Last summer, he participated in the 2024 Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at the Ohio State University, where he studied Slavic paleography and philology. His current research investigates the relationship between nationalism, socialism, and religion in the former Soviet Union and Poland in the post-war period. He is particularly interested in how the experience of state socialism and its social project contributed to the transformation of traditional national and religious identities, particularly after the death of Stalin. In his dissertation, he hopes to investigate how communist states fostered new senses of national belonging through mass media, education policy, military service, religious institutions, and popular culture.

Mariah Cady

Mariah Cady is an MSc student in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on state responsibility for and responses to displacement, to include protection for conscientious objectors and building quantitative models for understanding state harm. While completing her Capstone Year at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University for the Russian Flagship Program, she interned with the Kazakh International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law, providing assistance to asylum seekers and local lawyers. She graduated the program as a Language Flagship Certified Global Professional with Distinction and holds two BA degrees from the University of Georgia in Russian and International Affairs, alongside minors in German, Geography, and TESOL. She has also conducted research on the disparity between state initiation of conflict and refugee resettlement, the use of discourse markers among native and non-native speakers of Russian, and preventative recommendations of the European CPT on border violence in the Balkans. She adores language learning, studying German, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Kazakh alongside Russian. 

Eric D’Angelo

Eric D’Angelo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on state formation, authoritarian politics, and political violence in post-Soviet spaces. He has spent time in Russia and Armenia for research and language training, and worked previously as a geopolitical analyst. Eric holds BAs in Russian and International Studies from the Ohio State University and an MA from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). 

Mark Fedotov

Mark Fedotov is a junior research fellow at the Center for Central Asian and Caucasian Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His current research examines how the South Caucasus and its countries are presented in Türkiye’s foreign policy discourse and how this discourse has been constructed during the AKP period. Mark recently graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with an MSc in Political Science. His thesis focused on the evolution of Türkiye’s foreign policy doctrines under R. T. Erdoğan and how it influenced the country’s foreign policy strategy. Previously, he earned a BA in Political Science, specializing in Russian and East European Studies, from MSU’s Faculty of Political Science.

He was a winner of the International Contest of Research and Analytical Papers on the Middle East in honor of E. M. Primakov and has published several articles on regional powers’ policies in the South Caucasus.

His research areas include Türkiye’s foreign policy, international relations in the South Caucasus, and the current politics of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. He is also interested in modern ethno-social issues in the North Caucasus.

Mark is a native Russian speaker. His research languages include Turkish, Azerbaijani, French, and Ukrainian.

Sam Harshbarger 

Sam Harshbarger is a first-year MPhil student in History at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studies on a Rhodes Scholarship. His current research explores the intersection of Soviet nationalities policy, socialist internationalism, and the oil industry in Azerbaijan in the 1960s and 1970s through the experiences of foreign students at the Azerbaijan Oil and Chemical Institute. He is a research assistant at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pa. and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University. He has an A.B. in History from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude in May 2024 with certificates in History and the Practice of Diplomacy, Near Eastern Studies, and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. He was a 2024 Overseas Press Club Foundation Fellow at the Bangkok bureau of The Associated Press. His writing has also been published by the Baku Research Institute, The Daily Princetonian, Kültürkampf, and the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy.

Isaac Holmberg

Isaac Holmberg is a MPhil candidate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford. Broadly interested in postcolonial approaches to Russia-Central Asia relations, his research examines how post-2022 Russian migrants to Almaty, Kazakhstan are integrating into the city’s Russophone milieu. Before Oxford, Isaac earned a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Erfurt, Germany, and studied abroad at Saint Petersburg State University. Originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i, he has worked in think tanks in Germany and Kazakhstan, including at the German Council of Foreign Relations in Berlin. In addition to his academic work, Isaac is an aspiring journalist and a 2025 Overseas Press Club Foundation Fellow.

Calla Li

Calla Li is a PhD student in political science at Columbia University. Her research interests are centered around Russia-China relations and its impact on security and public opinion in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She is also interested in topics related to Chinese and Russian public diplomacy, cultural promotion, and soft power. Prior to Columbia, Calla taught English in Uralsk, Kazakhstan through the Fulbright program. She holds an MPhil in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge and a BA in International Relations and Russian and Eastern European studies from Pomona College. She speaks English, Russian, Chinese, and French. 

Mack Noxon

Mack Noxon is a PhD student in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the representation of the Caucasus in Russian literature since the early-nineteenth century. Specific topics of interest include portrayals of masculinity and gender, Russian identity vis-à-vis the Caucasus, and emotions and affect. Her most recent project analyzes imitation, ambivalence, and “going native” in Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time. Before coming to University of Illinois, she received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Emory University. 

Tamako Okano

Tamako, coming from Tokyo, Japan, is a first-year Master’s in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. Prior to attending the Kennedy School, she worked as a civil servant at the Japanese Ministry of Defense, where she drafted policies related to defense buildup, intelligence, and multilateral partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Tokyo. 

Caroline Solomon 

Caroline Solomon is a Master of Environmental Management student at Yale University, studying international energy policy and its role in furthering climate goals in Russia and Central Asia. Prior to Yale, she graduated with degrees in Russian and Environmental Economics & Management from the University of Georgia, and completed the Russian Overseas Flagship Capstone Year program at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In Almaty, she studied Russian intensively, worked as a translator and project manager for a Kazakh non-profit, and participated in Kazakh environmental remediation projects. In particular, Caroline is interested in the impacts of climate change in Russia and Central Asia, the role played by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the transformation of the Eurasian energy economy, and the potential for international energy and environmental partnerships in these regions. She plans to work on international energy and environmental policy in the future, with a focus on making current energy regimes more sustainable and secure.

Maya Watson

Maya Watson is a Russian and History major at Middlebury College. She works as a Research Assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), where she focuses on military cooperation between Russia and North Korea. Additionally, she studies Christian-Muslim relations during the Russian Imperial Period as a Research Assistant in the Middlebury College History Department, and she recently completed a senior thesis on national identity and migration in Soviet Kazakhstan. Maya was formerly a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at CNS, where her research focused on nuclear energy in Central Asia and China. Her publications include two contributions to Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History Volume 23. Russia (1800-1914) (BRILL, 2025) and “In Kazakhstan, Division over the Future of Nuclear Power,” an article for Inkstick Media. She is proficient in Russian and currently learning Ukrainian and Farsi.