Visitors 2011–12
Postdoctoral Fellows
 Boris Barkanov's research brings together international relations and comparative politics, and political economy and political sociology. His dissertation examines how revolution and state building in great powers affect the evolution of international regimes. He examines the evolution of the Energy Charter regime, which governs international energy markets, through the lens of Russian politics and foreign policy. He focuses on how variation in elite ideas about the legitimacy of state power shape state-society relations and the structure of foreign policy making, resulting in different types of state identity, foreign policies, and ultimately international regime outcomes. Because the Energy Charter regime governs the energy trade between Russia and the EU, this study is also a window into how EU-Russia relations have shifted in the last two decades. He is also interested in how the systematic examination of ideas can serve as a methodological platform for the study of politics more generally.
He was born in the USSR (Moscow) but came to the United States (Chicago) at the age of two. He speaks Russian, French, and Japanese, and received his BA in economics and French literature and language from Northwestern University. He received his PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley in August 2011.
 Maria Belodubrovskaya received her Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2011. She works on Soviet cinema, film history, film theory, aesthetics, and Stalinism. Her dissertation, "Politically Incorrect: Filmmaking under Stalin and the Failure of Power," focuses on the Soviet film industry and filmmaking community during the Stalin period. Maria's work has appeared in Tynianovskii sbornik and Kinokul'tura. Her most recent article is "The Jockey and the Horse: Joseph Stalin and the Biopic Genre in Soviet Cinema" (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 5:1). From Fall 2012, Maria will be Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
 Ian Campbell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2011. His dissertation, “Knowledge and Power on the Kazakh Steppe, 1845-1917,” explores the informational encounter between imperial Russian scholars and Kazakh intermediaries during the late imperial era. His other research interests include global and environmental history, as well as the comparative study of colonialism and imperialism. He will be in residence at the Davis Center as a postdoctoral fellow for the 2011-12 academic year.
 Pey-Yi Chu studies the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her current research interests center on the relationship between ideas about nature and economic practices. Developing this focus has drawn her into the history of science and technology, economic history, and
environmental history. Her dissertation analyzes evolving scientific ideas about frozen earth in eastern Siberia and situates the creation of Soviet permafrost science within the context of Stalinist industrialization. Pey-Yi completed undergraduate studies at Stanford University and graduate studies at Princeton University. Born in Taiwan and raised in California, she has pursued her project in archives and libraries across Eurasia, from England to the Republic of
Sakha. She aspires to a career in research, teaching, and communicating with the public.
 Maria Khotimsky received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her dissertation explored the interrelationship of translation and creative writing in twentieth-century Russian literature. Maria’s research interests include Russian poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; translation theory; and institutional approaches to literature; contemporary Russian and Polish literature. While at the Davis Center, she will be working on her postdoctoral project entitled “A Matter of Statewide Importance: Literary Translation in the Soviet Cultural Context.”
Senior Fellows
 Justyna Beinek (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, where she directs the Polish Language, Literature, and Culture Program. Her areas of interest include Polish, Russian, and comparative literature, film, visual arts, and popular culture. More specifically, Beinek’s research has focused on topics such as representations of the body in cultural texts, the phenomenon of imagined geographies and the idea of “The West” in Slavic cultures, as well as issues of national and gender identity, memory, and authorship. Beinek’s monograph “ ‘Portable Graveyards’: Russian and Polish Albums in the Age of Romanticism” is under editorial revision. Her co-edited volume of essays titled Re-mapping Polish-German Memory: Geographical, Cultural, and Political Space since World War II, is slated for publication in fall 2011. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Pushkin Review, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, Sarmatian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Postscriptum Polonistyczne, Roczniki Humanistyczne KUL, and other journals.
 Cathy Frierson, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), served for 5 years as Director of the Center for International Education at UNH. She is the Primary Investigator on three federal grants and is currently directing a three-year partnership with Vologda State Pedagogical University, Franklin Pierce Law Center, and UNH to support legal education in Vologda. She received her Ph.D. in 1985 in History from Harvard University. Her major publications include Children of the Gulag (Yale University Press, 2010), All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (University of Washington Press, 2002), and Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Oxford University Press, 1993). She will join the Center in 2011-2012 to continue work on her project “For the Sins of the Fathers: Children of Soviet ‘Enemies of the People.’”
 Scott Gehlbach is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also a research associate of CEFIR in Moscow, where he spent the 2007-2008 academic year as a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellow. He is the author of Representation Through Taxation: Revenue, Politics, and Development in Postcommunist States (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). Based on his dissertation on the political economy of taxation in postcommunist states, which won the Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in the field of political economy, this monograph was awarded an honorable mention for the AAASS Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies. He has also authored numerous articles in various journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. Professor Gehlbach received his Ph.D. in political science and economics from the University of California – Berkeley.
Fellows
 Andru Chiorean is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, where he is working on a thesis questioning the functioning, the role and the nature of censorship in the first decade of Communist Romania. His research interests also touch upon surveillance as a modern state practice, communist state-society relations, and political mobilization. While in residence as a fellow during the fall semester 2011, Andru is working on an article about the institutional forging of the censor as part of his broader dissertation, “Re-Writing the New Man: Censorship in Communist Romania, 1948–1960.”
Narantuya Danzan works as an associate professor at the National University of Mongolia. She obtained an MA in Population Studies from Peking University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex. Besides teaching, she works as a consultant for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and UN agencies. She is author of Religion in 20th century Mongolia: Social Changes and Popular Practices (Verlag, 2008), Child protection: Mongolia (Save the Children, UK, 2008) and co-author of "Social Protection Index" (ADB, 2006). As a Faculty Development Program fellow at the Davis Center, Dr. Danzan is developing courses on qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her research interests include social change and oral history.
 Evgeniia Kostareva is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). She received a degree of specialist of History in 2009; the theme of her thesis was "Formation of new political elite in Serbia (1985-1990)." Now she has focused her attention on the sphere of international relations and she is writing a thesis on "Mass Media and Soft Power in World Politics." She focuses on a new understanding of the place mass media is taking today in the intricate system of international relations, that of an independent actor in world politics. She examines how the role it plays in the day to day life of the public has changed and progressed on a global level, and how news coverage of world events influences politics, diplomacy and international relations.
 Denis Shershnev is a PhD candidate in Politics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where he is working on a thesis titled "Cultural Factors as Drivers of Technological Innovation: Analyzing Cases of China, India and Russia." In the last decade, the governments of BRIC countries have turned to technological innovations as a way to foster economic growth. They invest heavily in building the infrastructure for innovative parks, trying to encourage young entrepreneurs. But there are some doubts that innovations could evolve under the economic structure of state-capitalism, practiced in most of these countries. In his work, Denis is attempting to establish what cultural factors encourage innovation and which of these factors become impediments to innovative growth.
 Morena Skalamera is a Ph.D candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Trieste. She completed her master’s degree at the University of Trieste where she graduated summa cum laude. During her M.A. studies, she spent a semester at Eckerd College in Florida, where she improved her English and connected with professors who piqued her research interest in Russia-EU energy politics. For her Ph.D. work, she enrolled in the Program from the International University Institute for European Studies (IUIES). As a PhD candidate, she has been awarded a scholarship and grant to carry out research abroad. She has attended many international conferences on energy issues, including 'Scenario Work on Eurasian Gas 2030' at Columbia University. She has also written several articles in the realm of politics as related to the EU-Russia Energy Security relations. During her tenure at the Davis Center, she will be conducting research on the project “Energy Interdependencies between European Union and Russia: The Impacts on Crossborder Cooperation and Solutions for a Sustainable Development.” Her dissertation addresses cross-border cooperation, international relations between the EU and Russia, energy economics, risk, and policy. Her Ph.D. thesis investigates the geopolitical and strategic issues arising from the unequal distribution of global energy resources (in particular, natural gas) from the EU-Russia relations point of view; within that general topic, the role of transit countries will also be examined. Her research interests also include the role of sustainable environmental policy and energy infrastructure development.
Visiting Scholars
 Medea Badashvili is a PhD student at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Tbilisi State University (TSU). She holds BA and MA degrees in Human Geography. Her academic interests include anthropology of religion, gender studies, family studies and issues of integration of ethnical and religious minorities. She has worked with the Center for Social Sciences (CSS) since 2006; she is a Faculty member of CSS and delivers courses on "Introduction to Feminist Theory" and "Agency, Subjectivity and Social Changes" for the interdisciplinary English-language Master's and PhD programs in Gender Studies at Tbilisi State University. She has been a Faculty Development Program fellow at Rutgers; Carnegie Fellow at the University of California in Berkeley; and a fellow with many non-degree programs at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. At the moment she is a CARTI (Central Asia and Caucasus Research and Training Initiative) visiting Scholar at Harvard University. She has published articles in English, Russian and Georgian.
 Baktybek Beshimov combines extensive experience in education, politics, diplomacy, and development. From 1998 to 2009, Mr. Beshimov led an opposition faction in the parliament of Kyrgyzstan. He served as ambassador of Kyrgyzstan to India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh from 2000 to 2005. Previously, he played a key role in formulating development policy in Kyrgyzstan as an MP and as the national manager of the United Nations Fergana Valley Development Program and the UNDP Local Initiative for Urban Environment Program. Mr. Beshimov served as provost of the American University for Central Asia from 2005 to 2007, and as president of Osh State University from 1992 to 1996, promoting a system of liberal arts education. During the 2009–2010 academic year he was a visiting researcher at the Center for International Studies at MIT. He is a recipient of the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund Fellowship, and is in residence at the Davis Center as a visiting scholar. In April 2010 the National Endowment for Democracy awarded him the prestigious Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship. Mr. Beshimov frequently contributes to international and regional media; his co-edited book “Fergana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia” was published by John Hopkins University in April 2010. He envisions Central Asia as a region of vibrant independent states with democratic political systems, humane, visionary politics, and dynamic, innovative economies.
 Loren Graham is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. Professor Graham received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from Purdue University in 1986. Professor Graham specializes in the history of science and the study of contemporary science and technology in Russia. His publications include Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, with Jean-Michel Kantor (Belknap Press, 2009), Science in the New Russia: Crisis, Aid, Reform, with Irina Dezhina (2008), Moscow Stories (Indiana Press, 2006), A Face in the Rock (1995), Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (1993), The Ghost of the Executed Engineer (1993); Science and the Soviet Social Order (1990), Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (1987), and What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (1998). His Science, Philosophy and Science in the Soviet Union was nominated for the National Book Award. In 1996 he received the George Sarton medal of History of Science Society and in 2000 he received the Follo Award of the Michigan Historical Society for his contributions to Michigan history. He is a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science.
 Urs Heftrich received his Ph.D. in Slavic Studies in 1992 from the University of Heidelberg, where he currently holds the Chair of Slavic literatures. He also taught Russian, Czech, Polish, and German literature at the universities of Bonn and Trier, and at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He is the author of four monographs, covering such diverse topics as the Czech symbolist Otokar Březina, Czech reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Nikolay Gogol, and the Nazi genocide of the Czech Roma. As an editor and translator he has been mediating Czech literature in Germany since 1989, his main project in this field being the bilingual 14-volume edition of Vladimír Holan’s Collected works (co-edited with Michael Špirit). He has been regularly contributing on Slavic literatures to the German and Swiss dailies Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Presently he is translating Josef Čapek’s poetry from the concentration camps and completing a study on the impact of Hiroshima on Czech poetry.
 Bettina Kaibach received her Ph.D. in Slavic Literatures from Heidelberg University, where she currently teaches in the Slavic Institute and the English Department. Bettina has also taught at the University of Bonn and the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has published a number of articles on Russian, Czech, and Serbian literature. Her first book deals with the problem of time in Russian Symbolist Poetry (Vladimir Solovyev, Alexander Blok). At present, she is working on a book on Czech Holocaust Literature with a special focus on the Czech Jewish writer Jiří Weil. She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Images of Rupture in Civilization between East and West: The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media. Bettina is also a translator of Czech and Russian literature. She co-edited and translated the short prose of Jiří Weil. Her translations of Jan Čep and of modern Czech poetry appeared in the representative series “Czech Library.” Currently, she is preparing a new edition, translation, and commentary of Isaak Babel’s prose for the German publishing house Carl Hanser. Since 2009, Bettina has been a contributor to the Berlin-based daily “Tagesspiegel,” where she writes on Eastern European and American literature.
 Tea Kamushadze is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. Her research interests deals with the socialist heritage in post-communist Georgia using the example of the industrial city of Rustavi. She examines this particular city as a communist project with national branding. By observing the process of transformation and the reinterpretation of representational narratives of the city, she shows how struggles over the identity of the city have materialized. In doing so, she also aims to gain insight into the time dynamics of this struggle, and particularly how this is revealed in three imagined times: reconstruction of the historical, figurative past, then of the city built by the communists and, lastly, the city's post-soviet reality. Currently, she is a fellow with the Open Society Foundation's Central Asia and Caucasus Research and Training Initiative (CARTI) Program. In 2009-2010, she was a fellow with the Lane Kirkland scholarship at Jagellonian University in Cracow, where she defended her diploma on the Polish experience of socialism and new policy, exploring the case of Nowa Huta, an industrial district of Cracow, and its integration discourse within the city.
 Shota Khinchagashvili is a Ph.D. student of Soviet and Post-Soviet Sudies at Ilia State University (Tbilisi). His doctoral research is focused on collective memory and politics of remembrance in contemporary Georgia. The research primarily deals with cultural politics, including monuments and the Museum of Soviet Occupation, as well as legislative initiatives explicitly related to the recent past. Last year he presented his preliminary observations at the Fourth Annual Research Forum of the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. Before becoming a Junior Fellow with the Open Society Foundation's Central Asia and Caucasus Research Training Initiative, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with MSc in Nationalism Studies. Upon returning to Georgia, Shota became a Junior Fellow at the Institute of Political Science of Georgia. Under the auspices of the Institute his two theses were published: Post-Soviet Georgian Nationalism in the Context of Social Memory and Cultural Trauma Theories (2008) and Questions of Religious and Cultural Identity of Caucasian Peoples in Post-Soviet Period (2007).
 Marek Nekula is a Professor of the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Department of Czech Studies at the University of Regensburg. He has published on Czech/Slavic and German literature and culture, especially on Czech literature of the 19th and the early 20th centuries and contemporary Czech literature, as well as on Franz Kafka and Prague German literature. His most important book is the monograph Franz Kafka’s Languages: „... on a floor of the inner Tower of Babel...“ (2003). Other publications deal with the semiotics of space, bilingualism and contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, as well as Czech grammar. Nekula's publications were prepared in projects supported by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the German Research Association, the German Federal Ministry for Research and Education, the Bavarian Ministry for Research and Arts, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Research Foundation of the Czech Republic, the Czech National Museum, etc. He has also published short stories Pellicova 47 (1994) and a novel The Father (2008), and is preparing an anthology of Czech-German authors “I dream about Prague…” (2012). His project in the Davis Center deals with the Pantheon in Czech literature and culture and is situated in the context of the semiotics of culture. It focuses on the role of public funerals, as well as architectonical and literary pantheons for the mobilization and constitution of national and other collectives.
 Keiji Sato is a research fellow at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University. He holds a Ph.D. in social-cultural studies (Kyushu University), and wrote his dissertation on analysis of ethnic mobilization at the end of Soviet period. His recent publications are “The Analysis of the ‘Matrioshka’ Structure of Ethnic Problems during the Decline of the Soviet Era: The Case Study of the Problem of Polish-Lithuanians” (in Japanese), Slavic Studies 54 (2007); “Mobilization of Non-titular Ethnicities during the Last Years of the Soviet Union: Gagauzia, Transnistria, and the Lithuanian Poles,” Acta Slavica Iaponica, Volume 26 (2009); “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Commission and Claims of Post-Soviet Secessionist Territories to Sovereignty,” Demokratizathiya, Volume 18, Number 2 (2010).
 Thomas W. Simons, Jr., holds an A.M. and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard and is the author of four books and dozens of articles on Central and East European history and on East-West relations and the Subcontinent. His latest book is Eurasia’s New Frontiers: Young States, Old Societies, Open Futures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). As a career foreign service officer (1963–1998), he specialized in East-West relations; in the 1990s he was U.S. ambassador to Poland, coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union (which took him to 12 of the 15 new Eurasian republics, many of them more than once), and U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. From 1998 to 2002 he taught international and modern Islamic history at Stanford. Subsequently he led the Program on Eurasia in Transition at the Davis Center. He teaches courses on the region in Harvard’s Government Department, including a seminar on “Islam in Central and South Asia: Comparative Hegemonies and Liberations.”
 Nikolay Valkov graduated with an MA in Government and MBA in Finance from the University of Notre Dame. During his Ph.D. studies at the Université de Montréal he explored the relationship between membership in voluntary organizations and democratic performance in post-Communist Europe. His doctoral dissertation was published in the form of articles in Communist and Post-Communist Studies and Voluntas. His findings were presented as papers at the annual meetings of APSA, ISA, and AAASS. Dr. Valkov received a post-doctoral grant for Yale University from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture to continue the study of civil society in communist countries. At the Davis Center, he will conduct comparative research on associational life in contemporary Russia, China, and Cuba.
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