George Andrei (History) recently published the piece "Between Sustainability and Development in Romania," as part of the initiative for public engagement developed by NYU's Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. You can read the piece here.
Erin Dusza (Art History) has relocated to Brno, Czech Republic to conduct doctoral dissertation research on Czech art and the role of nostalgia in national identity creation in the nineteenth century. Supported by a Fulbright research grant (deferred from 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic), Erin’s nine-month sojourn in Brno will enable her to exploit the resources of Masaryk University and the Moravian Library.
Maria Fokina (Musicology) has accepted a position as the Project Coordinator for the Russian Studies Workshop at REEI.
Alisha Kirchoff (Sociology) is Visiting Instructor in the Department of Sociology at Macalester College.
Szabolcs László (History) published “Six Appraisals of the Illiberal Mind,” a piece that compares the illiberal populist regimes in Hungary and Poland, in Democracy Seminar in July. During the summer, he delivered online presentations based on his dissertation research about the globalization of the Hungarian Kodály Method during the Cold War at the 27th International Conference of Europeanists and the 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies. In October, he presented “Interlocking Truth Regimes. Internationally Mobile Scholars as Targets of Cold War Agendas” at a workshop organized by the Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest and “Small State Orientalism and Imperial History: Hungarian Explorations and Instrumentalizations of Central Asia,” at a workshop organized by the Munich Centre for Global History.
Filip Mitricevic (History) published his latest op-ed in the Serbian daily Danas (Today) on November 4 under the title "How My Friend Joined the Ruling Party." A rumination on Czeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind, the piece treats the everyday personal choices of Serbs in 2021 in the face of what the opposition and some foreign thinkers are labeling a dictatorial regime.
Dafna Rachok (Anthropology) was awarded two major grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research in support of her dissertation research in Ukraine, where she will spend the next 18 months investigating access to health care, and HIV prevention and treatment in particular, for vulnerable populations such as commercial sex workers.
Nataliya Shpylova Saeed (Slavic) presented “Entangled Past-Contested Memory” at International Scientific Conference "30 years: How we write and create the history of contemporary Ukraine" in Kharkiv (Ukraine) in September, ““Mnemonic Entanglements and Contested Identities: Palimpsests of Contestations in Ukraine” at the Memory Studies Association Annual Conference in Warsaw in July, and “Contested Memory: Premises and Repercussions” at the 2nd Annual Taras Shevchenko Conference, held at IU Bloomington in March. She is the recipient of a EURO Graduate Student Grant. The Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures presented her with the Jerzy Kolodziej Excellence in Teaching Award in Spring 2021 and has awarded herthe Neatrour-Edgerton Fellowship Spring 2022.
John C. Stanko (Political Science) was named runner-up in the NYU Jordan Center’s second annual Graduate Student Essay Competition for his "Bigger Nets Mean More Goals: Russian Cultural Diplomacy and the KH."
Jessica Storey-Nagy (CEUS) has published "Creating Truths in Orbán's Hungary" in Anthropology News (November-December 2021: https://www.anthropology-news.org/).
Leah Valtin-Erwin (History) is currently conducting research in Bucharest under the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays program. Her article, "A Bag for All Systems: Historicizing Shopping Bags in Eastern European Consumer Culture, 1980–2000," an earlier version of which won the 2019 Daniel Armstrong Memorial Research Paper Award, was published in the Journal of Contemporary History in November 2021. In Fall 2021, she was a visiting fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany.
Nikolina Zenovic (Antrhopology) presented "Papa Smurf and "Sviće Zora": Citing Cartoons and Folklore in Protests Against the 2019 Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion" at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Baltimore in November.