Newsletter

Dear Friends of REEI,

Welcome to the Fall 2024 issue of our newsletter! We are now in a final dash towards the end of a very busy and successful semester.

This fall, REEI experienced an important transition: after seventeen years of co-piloting REEI through many successes and challenges, Mark Trotter retired from his position as Associate Director and Outreach Coordinator. We are truly grateful to Mark for all he has done for the Institute! While Mark is still around a few hours a week, helping us navigate the transition and finishing some outstanding projects, in August we welcomed the new Associate Director, Lindsey Grutchfield, who is also a recent REEI alumna.

Together with Lindsey, Elliott Nowacky, Heysol Buitrago, Clare Angeroth Franks, and our amazing graduate assistants, we have been busy at work coordinating a wide range of events and projects: from hosting a poetry reading with the acclaimed Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska and presenting Dr. Mark Kramer’s lecture “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in Historical Perspective: How the War Began, How It Might End,” to screening Jacky Comforty’s multi-award-winning documentary film Monument of Love, which tells the story of the Jewish people during the Holocaust in Bulgaria. There is still more to come, including an early December event “The Singing Revolution Approaches 35: Cinematic and Historical Perspectives on a Historic Event,” in which Kevin Karnes will guide us through a screening of a film Singing Revolution.

This fall we started the REEI Colloquium, a series of talks intended to give members of REEI community the opportunity to learn about each other’s work. This semester we heard three such talks from REEI affiliates: “Deafness in the Interwar Romanian Press: From ‘Abnormal’ Children to Celebrated Soccer Stars” (Prof. Maria Bucur), “Incorporating Populist Authoritarian Rhetoric into Dynamic Legitimation Theory” (PhD candidate John C. Stanko), and “Fiber, Meat, and Bone: Legacies of Soviet Trade in the Mongolian Cashmere Industry” (Prof. Kathryn E. Graber).

There has been a positive response to REEI’s new course offerings. Featured in a recent article, Dr. Jessica Storey-Nagy’s “Disinformation and the State in East Europe” has had robust enrollments and will be reprised again in Spring 2025. Likewise, Clare Griffin’s “We are What we Eat: A Cultural History of Food in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia” has been very successful. We are now also offering several two-credit, three-week online courses: “War of the Waves: Radio Broadcasting and Ideological Warfare, 1945-2023” (PhD candidate Grace Pechianu), “Resonance and Resilience: Music and Protest in Contemporary Eastern Europe” (PhD candidate Masha Fokina), and “Wine Industry in Post-Communism: Politics, Ecology, and Taste” (Dr. Justin Otten).

Our students and alumni are thriving. We were delighted to host Ambassador James F. Collins during his quick visit to IU and to present a professional development event with REEI/O’Neill alumnus Eric Boyle and Aaron Kennet, who is a current student at O’Neill and an REEI FLAS fellow. We have a robust new cohort that includes two students in our new Accelerated Master’s Program, in which motivated students can complete both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just five years.

Please stop by the REEI Reception at ASEEES (p. 19) on Friday, November 22, 8-10pm in the Suffolk Meeting Room to say hello to old friends; raise your glass to Mark Trotter; and welcome Lindsey Grutchfield, our new affiliate in Russian History Prof. Andy Bruno, and all other new members of REEI, faculty and students alike.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

REEI is excited to welcome many new community members, faculty, staff, and students for the Fall 2024 semester.

With the retirement of Mark Trotter, whose extensive contributions to REEI we will celebrate at a later date, the position of REEI Associate Director and Outreach Coordinator was assumed by Lindsey Grutchfield. Lindsey is herself an REEI graduate, holding an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Indiana University as well as a B.A. in Journalism from American University.

Our new MA cohort for Fall 2024 consists of Lee Andrews, Brittany Janosi, Ryan McCrea, Lewis Poggie, Sydney Verel, and Tabor Wells. Lee Andrews and Tabor Wells are students in REEI’s Accelerated Master’s Program (AMP).

The new MA cohort has research interests that include ethnopolitical relations and identities during the decline of Yugoslavia, democracy in Georgia, nuclear weapons and arms control during the Cold War, artifact retention and the importance of physical historical objects in Hungary and Romania, the intersection between politics, crime, and digital media in former Warsaw Pact countries, and hybrid threats and warfare affecting the Visegrad Group. To learn more about our new MA students, visit the Graduate Students page on REEI’s website.

REEI is also delighted to announce several new affiliate faculty: Prof. Andy Bruno (History), Prof. Temirlan Moldogaziev (O’Neill), and Laikin Dantchenko (Libraries). Prof. Bruno is an environmental historian of Russia and the Soviet Union focusing on locations such as borderlands in the Arctic and the Siberian wilderness. His first book examined the environmental history of economic transformation in the Russian north during the twentieth century and his second book explored the history of the 1908 Tunguska explosion. Prof. Moldogaziev’s expertise is in local governance, public finance and economics, and public management. In addition to working on fiscal governance in the United States, he is interested in Central and East European, Caucasian, and Central Asian transitions. Laikin Dantchenko is the Music Audiovisual Metadata Librarian at the Cook Music Library in the Jacobs School of Music. She catalogs all music materials in Slavic and East European languages.

We extend a warm welcome to REEI’s current visiting scholars: Luca Csák, the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant for Hungarian in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies; Rebecca Cravens, the Russian Flagship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures; and Cătălina Tesăr, Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology.

REEI is honored to host this year’s US Army War College Fellow, Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Baugh, an active-duty US Army officer with more than 20 years of service. Her most recent assignment was as Senior Defense Official/Military Attaché at the US Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. Baugh is our 5th Strategic Russian and East European Fellow and will be spending the academic year taking coursework with REEI.

During the 2024-25 academic year, REEI is hosting its fifth US Army War College (USAWC) Fellow – Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Stephanie Baugh.

REEI is among only 49 institutions around the globe to host USAWC Fellows – field-grade officers who complete individual learning plans designed to enhance their critical thinking, academic prowess, and professional skills while sharing their practical expertise and representing the US Army to their host institution and community.

A West Point graduate, LTC Baugh earned an MA in National Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School and graduated with honors from the Defense Language Institute Russian Basic Course in Monterey, California. She has served overseas in South Korea, Iraq, Germany, and Lithuania. LTC Baugh has been embedded with foreign military forces in Iraq and Ukraine and interned at U.S. Embassies in Armenia, Estonia and Ukraine. She has traveled for official business throughout the former Soviet Union, including the Baltics, Caucasus, and Russia.

Most recently, LTC Baugh was Senior Defense Official and Defense Attaché to Lithuania at the US Embassy in Vilnius from July 2021 to June 2024. She represented the US Secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of the US European Command to the government of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Armed Forces. She was also the senior military advisor for two U.S. ambassadors while supervising the Defense Attaché Office, the Office of Defense Cooperation, the Special Operations Forces Liaison Element, and the Baltics Force Protection Detachment.

As a USAWC Fellow, LTC Baugh is auditing a Russian language course, Eurasian Firewalls, American Foreign Policy: Navigating the Nuclear Age, and Anthropology of War and Conflict in Eastern Europe.

“An important part of my fellowship is serving as an Army ambassador to engage students, faculty researchers and the public in both formal and informal capacities at REEI and HLS,” said LTC Baugh. “I am excited to share my field experience as an Army Foreign Area Officer with the graduate students, or anyone interested.”

LTC Baugh believes the USAWC fellowship is mutually beneficial for the Army and IU. “This program is incredible and unique,” she said. “It’s important for future Army senior leaders to have an informed strategic understanding of Russia, especially with the geopolitical situation that we’re seeing – not just in Europe but globally. My expectation is that, as Army leaders coming to this program, we are contributing in a positive way and modeling Army values.”

This article is a condensed version of an article by Linda Bollivar for the Hamilton Lugar School, republished with permission. Read the full article here.

by Regina Smyth, Professor, Department of Political Science

During the 2024 summer, Prof. Regina Smyth, an REEI affiliate faculty member, and Prof. Pauline Jones of the University of Michigan’s Department of Political Science, organized an IU Berlin Gateway Conference, partially supported by funding from REEI. The conference brought together 25 scholars from around the world to launch a new field of research: protest legacies.

National protest events are becoming increasingly common in authoritarian states around the world. While international attention to these events is often limited to a few days, protest cycles have profound longer-term effects, or legacies, for state and societal developments. As Prof. Regina Smyth demonstrates in her 2020 book, Elections, Protest and Authoritarian Regime Stability, Russia’s 2011-2012 For Fair Elections Movement (FFE) transformed Russia. The Kremlin’s response was a top-down project to instill authoritarian state values and develop new tools of election fraud, repression, and propaganda. FFE protests also renewed opposition. For a decade, Alexey Navalny and his team challenged the regime at the ballot box and on the streets, developing new election strategies, providing public education about corruption, and launching protest waves against corruption, election fraud, and Navalny’s arrest after his return to Russia. These actions also influenced war-time protests and migration.

Building on this Russian study, Prof. Smyth and Prof. Jones launched a research collaboration, funded by the National Science Foundation, to define a protest legacy toolkit to measure post-protest dynamics in non-democratic states. The toolkit employs field observation, surveys, interviews, text analysis, and data on policy changes, melding regional studies with disciplinary work. The resulting evidence reveals the actions of state and societal leaders as they capitalize on the new information, challenges, and opportunities that protest generates.

Initial findings confirm the value of studying protest legacies beyond regime change or authoritarian consolidation to understand system adaptation. In Kazakhstan, we find that while the Kassym-Jomart Tokayev regime has rebuilt popular support, state efforts to use propaganda to control the narrative about the January 2022 protests had a limited influence on popular beliefs. We also find that society remains skeptical about the long-term value of reforms introduced after protest. In Georgia, we are using text analysis, elite interviews, and surveys to study how the legacies of the Spring 2024 Foreign Agent Law protest cycle influenced preparations for October 2024 elections. While the incumbent Georgia Dream party continues to try to control the elections, protests reinvigorated the electorate and the opposition, changing the electoral dynamics.

Our research underscores that protest legacies are increasingly linked to Russian intervention in the domestic politics of sovereign states, highlighting important connections between domestic and foreign policy. In Kazakhstan, the reliance on Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) troops to re-establish order widened the divide between Kazakh and Russian speakers and limited support for Russia. As a result, President Tokayev has looked to China to balance Russian influence and limit the rifts in Kazakhstani support for the regime. In Georgia, Russia’s continued occupation of territory and attempt to export its illiberal playbook on domestic politics reinvigorated the opposition and opposition party cooperations. Similar developments are occurring in Moldova as national elections approach. These findings provide new windows on Russian foreign policy strategies and new insights into how to limit Russia’s reach around the globe.

Beyond the scholarly research and policy implications of our research, the project informs our teaching and mentoring. Prof. Smyth and Prof. Jones both teach courses on protest legacies and have involved graduate and undergraduate students in the project. Working with local partners, they built new research networks and scholarly collaboration: the IU Berlin Gateway Conference this past summer provided a strong intellectual infrastructure for future funding proposals.

by Kirby Fleitz

In May of this year, a group of Indiana University undergraduate and graduate students toured several locations in northern Serbia over two weeks to explore how minority communities and artists/filmmakers explore pressing social issues under the official program title of “Seeking Refuge: Exploring the Problems of Serbia’s Minority Communities through Art.” This region is historically multiethnic, and home to Serbs, Hungarians, Bosniaks, Roma, Slovaks, Croats, and smaller minority groups. In the past, there were also large Jewish communities in the cities visited by the students.

Prof. Halina Goldberg, Director of REEI, and Prof. Russell Valentino, Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures—inspired by an earlier IU supported exchange in 2022 and 2023, for which Prof. Alex Lichtenstein (History) coordinated a civil rights museum tour of the US South with students from the University of Novi Sad in Serbia—teamed up to support a similar tour for IU students in Serbia. The trip was supported in large part by a generous gift from Ann Jakisich Erne and David A. Erne, and by a grant from the Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Literature & Letters. Two PhD student participants, Dorotea Sotirovska (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures) and Natasha Rubanova (Comparative Literature), also received McCloskey Fellowships from REEI, which partially funded their travel for participation in the program. Additional funding came from the IU College of Arts & Sciences International Office and REEI’s Ransel-Mellon Foundation fund.

The trip was co-organized by Prof. Goldberg and Prof. Nicoletta Rousseva (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures), who coordinated with her Serbian network of artists, filmmakers, NGO workers, and activists to make the itinerary possible. The organizers received invaluable logistical assistance from two local coordinators, Milica Milijaković and Minja Petrović, the latter an alumna of REEI (2023) and a recipient of the Ann and David Erne Fellowship for Serbian Studies.

Program participants toured Belgrade and the cities of Novi Sad and Subotica in the Vojvodina region. The focus on the multiethnic Vojvodina was a conscious choice, as the trip was structured around the central question of how minority communities in this region utilize art to engage with social issues. The program included museum tours, workshops and discussions with local artists and community organizers, and film screenings.

By exposing students to the diverse communities of Vojvodina, the organizers ultimately hoped the trip helped challenge stereotypes and assumptions of the region that students may have held before starting the program. Knowing that the trip would deal with issues of war and genocide, Prof. Rousseva said she also wanted to “create a program that made room for that and then that also highlighted another aspect of Serbian culture, which is its massive multicultural communities and that the Balkans have been the center of the migrant crisis for the past ten years.”

The trip culminated in a final project from each participant, which they presented at a gallery reception and research showcase. Prof. Rousseva intended these projects to “[connect students] to the region beyond their two-week program” by allowing students to explore issues important to them in a new setting. “[What the students would take away] was something that was really on my mind as I was creating the itinerary and the program, thinking about what the student experience would be,” Prof. Rousseva said.

“I am so grateful to have had the chance to travel to Serbia, especially with this wonderful group of peers, the leadership of Professor Rousseva and Professor Goldberg, the guidance of our local experts and friends Milica and Minja, and with the generosity and wisdom of our many hosts,” Kate McClintock, a then-Junior studying History, Film, Communication and Public Advocacy, wroteof the experience. “I am so excited to have returned with much more to learn.”

A lookbook of students’ final projects can be accessed here.

Musicology PhD candidate Grace Pechianu’s project on Radio Free Europe’s (RFE) musical broadcasts to Romania began as a research paper for Prof. Halina Goldberg’s seminar Music and Politics. Since then, it has unfolded into an archival dissertation exploring the networks of Romanian exiles’ and Radio Free Europe’s (RFE) contributions to ideological warfare between 1950 and 1967. This year, Pechianu is teaching a three-week, online course called War of the Waves on radio-mediated cultural programming and its political implications during the Cold War and beyond.

Pechianu’s work is informed by archival research at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University and at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) in Budapest, supported in part by an REEI Mellon Endowment Student Grant-in-Aid of Research.

The idea for the course originated from a serendipitous encounter with RFE broadcast reels of music for socialist Romania located at Hoover Institution Library and Archives. Even with the awareness of RFE’s covert CIA backing and role in disseminating counterpropaganda throughout the Eastern Bloc, the music did not initially strike Pechianu as subversive or overtly political, but the Romanian government famously jammed Western radio frequencies and harassed and assassinated employees at RFE headquarters in Munich. This led Pechianu to the question: how did RFE’s music programming confront socialist doctrines while enabling communication between East and West?

RFE sound recordings, broadcasting guidelines, and internal documents at both the Hoover and OSA archives provided Pechianu with insights into the process and rationale of assembling cultural programs. The RFE materials at the OSA were particularly valuable, not solely because of their factual accuracy, but also via their content and presentation, which revealed much about the mindsets and motivations of RFE personnel.

War of the Waves, the course informed by Pechianu’s research, extends beyond her dissertation topic: the class explores cultural programming in broadcasts from Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC during the period from the Cold War to the present. Students are invited on a sonic tour of Soviet-era Eastern Europe, Chile, Korea, and present-day Ukraine to explore experimental and improvisatory radio formats featuring political refugees. This course welcomes students from all backgrounds to consider the process and rationale informing the creation, framing, and dissemination of radio-mediated content and current events while contemplating the broader political implications of cultural transmissions.

Pechianu hopes that, through this experience, students may critically examine broadcast media as a site of ideological confrontation, its potential for mobilizing political dissent, and understand its enduring popularity as a democratic, accessible, and adaptable medium fostering community and engagement in current events. War of the Waves will be offered as a 2-credit, undergraduate course, which students can take either in the Fall (12/2/2024–12/20/2024) or in the Spring (1/8/2025-1/26/2025) and which will be held online, Monday/Wednesday, 6:30-7:45 PM.

by Kirby Fleitz

Since 2022, a group of novice and experienced filmmakers have worked to maintain the tradition of independent filmmaking in the increasingly hostile Russian environment under the title “Un/Filmed.”

Un/Filmed was born as a series of online workshops where Russian-speaking filmmakers could connect, improve their skills, and digitally network. With support from REEI via the Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuval Fund, the first in-person Un/Filmed series was held in Yerevan, Armenia, in 2023 and the second in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in Fall 2024.

The Un/Filmed crew collaborate with local filmmakers to facilitate the filmmakers’ own projects. The Yerevan series occurred during and in the wake of the forced expulsion of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan in September 2023, and many filmmakers used Un/Filmed as an opportunity to process these events and their personal and familial impacts. The 2024 workshop in Bishkek was facilitated by a partnership with the American University of Central Asia, which contributed both funding and logistical support. The resulting short documentaries can be found on the Un/Filmed website and on REEI’s YouTube page.

Prof. Tatiana Saburova, who participated in the initial online workshops and helped coordinate the 2023 Yerevan and 2024 Bishkek workshops, stressed the importance of Un/Filmed’s ability to provide a platform for Russian-language films that confront social issues to exist, when such films are challenging if not impossible to make in Russia’s current media landscape. Un/Filmed founder Victor Ilyukhin concurs, believing that the ultimate mission of Un/Filmed is “to give [Russian speakers who can’t live in Russia] a community in which they can still freely explore the topics they want to film and kind of feel each other’s support in this.”

Prof. Saburova also argued that Russian-speaking filmmakers’ work is of value to scholars who can no longer conduct fieldwork in Russia. While not necessarily traditional field work, she said,“It is kind of a slice of [Russian] society and what is going on and how it will react.”

by Halina Goldberg (with contributions from Sofiya Asher, Svitlana Melnyk, & Sarah Phillips)

REEI continues to champion Ukrainian studies at Indiana University. In July, a select group of IU Ukrainian studies specialists—Profs. Svitlana Melnyk, Sarah Phillips, and Robert Kravchuk—were invited to the conference “The U.S.-Ukraine Partnership in Education: Stronger Together,” at the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Organized by the Ukrainian Embassy in the United States under the patronage of Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska, the event highlighted the importance of spreading knowledge about Ukraine across continents. During the conference, the organizers also announced the creation of the Global Coalition of Ukrainian Studies.

In her keynote address, Zelenska emphasized the significance of Ukrainian contributions to science and culture in cultivating strong partnerships. Another keynote speaker, Halyna Hryn, president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, underscored the role of education as a matter of national security. IU Professor Emeritus Robert Kravchuk spoke about IU’s efforts to support Ukrainian scholars during the war through the IU-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program (NRSP).

The NRSP for Ukrainian scholars was established in 2022, in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion, at the initiative of Profs. Svitlana Melnyk, Sarah Phillips, and Russell Valentino. Between 2022 and 2024, two rounds of funding from the Office of the Provost and supplemental funding from many IU units, programs, and departments enabled 69 social science and humanities scholars in Ukraine to continue their research and teaching activities. Scholars were supported by a $5,000 stipend and access to IU Libraries’ rich e-resources. The program continues in 2024-25, now with support from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Senior International Officers, the BTAA Liberal Arts and Sciences Deans, and matching contributions from nine BTAA universities, including IU.

In October, IU hosted acclaimed Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska, including a reading from her most recent volume of poetry, The Voices of Babyn Yar. In her stirring poems, Kiyanovska channels the voices of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events and, for some, experiencing their own deaths in the massacre at Babyn Yar, during which more than 30,000 Kyivan Jews were murdered by Nazis. Kiyanovska’s visit, spearheaded by Sofiya Asher, was co-organized by the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute and the Department of Slavic and East European Language and Cultures, with co-sponsorship from the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, the Ukrainian Studies Organization, and the Department of Comparative Literature.

Other REEI-co-sponsored events focused on Ukraine include a very well received 2024 Lotus Festival performance by Maryna Krut, the well-known Ukrainian singer and virtuoso on the bandura. Ukraine will be featured in November lectures from Dr. Ivanna Cherchovych and Dr. Mark Kramer. Dr. Cherchovych, a researcher and head of educational projects at the Lviv Center for Urban History, will introduce the platform REESOURCES. Rethinking Eastern Europe, designed as a cooperative space for sharing and translating primary sources from the local languages of the region (Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, Russian, Belarusian, etc.) in her lecture “Teaching (from) Elsewhere: Decentering East European Studies Curriculum.” In “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in Historical Perspective: How the War Began, How It Might End,” Dr. Kramer, Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, discussed the roots of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine in the breakdown of Soviet Union in 1991 and in Vladimir Putin’s determination to bring Ukraine to heel, while considering whether a negotiated settlement is possible.

We are looking forward to the continuation of the new series Українські діалоги (Ukrainian Dialogues), presenting Ukrainian-language talks, and in collaboration with colleagues from the Cook Music Library and the Archives of Traditional Music, we are preparing a December exhibition exploring the 100-year history and significance of the song “Shchedryk,” which inspired the American holiday classic “Carol of the Bells.”

Emma Carlson (REEI MA) accepted a FLAS Fellowship from the European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian during the university’s 2024 Summer Language Institute. Carlson will also present a paper as part of a panel at the 2024 ASEEES Convention in Boston in November.

Erin Dusza (REEI PhD Minor) will defend her Art History dissertation, entitled “Art, Historicism, and Nostalgia in the Creation of Czechoslovak National Identity,” on November 15th, 2024 via Zoom. Through a close examination of iconography in public artworks, the study demonstrates how national symbols develop and communicate national identity. The research for this dissertation was made possible through a Fulbright research grant and an REEI/Mellon dissertation completion grant.

Kirby Fleitz (REEI MA/REEI Outreach Assistant) was elected the new Polish Cultural Association President at the end of the Spring 2024 semester. From July 1st to 28th, she attended an intensive summer language program in Lublin, Poland, through the Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski. Fleitz received generous funding to attend this program, including an REEI Mellon Grant and the Polish Century Club Exploratory Research Fellowship through the Polish Century Club of Indianapolis.

Antonina Semivolos (REEI MA/JD) has a forthcoming law review article, “Your Face is Big Data in Moscow: Everyday Reality v. Official Presentation of The Smart City,” in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy. Semivolos also contributed an article on the history of Moscow, “The State of Russian Media Through the Lens of Democratization: 1991 as the Peak of Openness in Russia’s Media Laws,” as part of the Routledge Handbooks Series (Taylor & Francis).

John C. Stanko (Political Science PhD/REEI Curriculum Assistant) published “Role Theory, Non-Coercive Influence, and the Agency of Target States: The Case of Kazakhstan’s Ambassadorial Corps and the Russian Diplomatic Academy” in Foreign Policy Analysis. Stanko also co-authored, with Spenser A. Warren, a policy piece in War on the Rocks entitled “Russian Threat Perception and Nuclear Strategy in its Plans for War with China.” In August 2024, Stanko participated in a peer reviewer professionalization workshop through Arizona State’s Melikian Center and will contribute as a peer reviewer for the Writing Across Boundaries initiative.

Prof. Michael Alexeev (Department of Economics) co-authored, with Robert Conrad, Evolutionary Tax Reform in Emerging Economies with Oxford University Press. Prof. Alexeev also published several articles recently: “Local Fiscal Health in Russia: Achilles’ Heel of Fiscal Federalism?” in the International Journal of Public Administration (with Andrey Yushkov and Ivan Dedyukhin); “Russian regions in wartime: fiscal and economic effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war” in Post-Soviet Affairs (with Andrey Yushkov); “Institutions, Abilities, and the Allocation of Talent” in the Journal of Comparative Economics (with Timur Natkhov and Leonid Polishchuk); and “The role of indirect oil and natural gas revenues in the Russian government budget” in Eurasian Geography and Economics (with Andrey Chernyavskiy and Alena Chepel).

Prof. Malgorzata Cavar (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures): co-authored, with Bartłomiej Czaplicki, an article in Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics entitled “The variation in the realization of Ukrainian back fricatives as onset lenition and non-markedness reducing coda neutralization: a 3D/4D ultrasound study.” Prof. Cavar also presented the following with various collaborators: “Articulatory correlates of morphologically conditioned assimilation: Evidence from ultrasound imaging,” Variation as a measure of goodness of a category,” The mechanics of palatalization: A dynamic account,” and “Variance and invariance in Phonological Representation: Insights from Articulation” at the LabPhon 19 Conference at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea; “The representation of back fricatives in Ukrainian and Markedness Theory: implications of an instrumental articulatory study” at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 33 (FASL33) in Halifax, Canada; and “Onset lenition and coda neutralization in Ukrainian” at the International Congress of Linguistics in Poznań, Poland.

Laikin Dantchenko (Music Audiovisual Metadata Librarian) co-authored an article with Jack Haig Nighan in Music Reference Services Quarterly entitled “Preserving Ukrainian Identity: Ethical Cataloging of Ukrainian Music in Soviet Publications.” Dantchenko was also invited to present on decolonizing Ukrainian music in music libraries and reference resources in a joint panel, “Opportunities and Challenges in Decolonizing Music Libraries,” in October 2024 as part of the International Musicological Society (IMS) Global Music History Group Study Day: “The Decolonial Potential in Global Music History.”
Prof. Michael De Groot (International Studies) is a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University during the 2024-25 academic year.

Prof. Debra Friedman (Second Language Studies) and Natalia Kudriavsteva are co-editors of the recently published Language and Power in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Prof. Halina Goldberg’s (Jacobs School of Music/REEI Director) new book, The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture: Between Practice and Phantasm, coedited with Bożena Shallcross, is in production with Indiana University Press. Prof. Goldberg contributed a chapter “The Jewish Inn in the Polish National Ballet” for The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture and a chapter “The Piano Virtuosa at Home and Away: Transnational Salon Networks of Maria Szymanowska, Maria Kalergis-Muchanoff, and Marcelina Czartoryska” for A History of Women and Musical Salons (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). She also gave numerous presentations, both virtually and in-person, to audiences at Cornell University, Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the University of Michigan, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Latvian Academy of Music in Riga, IU Europe Gateway in Berlin, University of Warsaw, and the Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus-Senftenberg. In the spring of 2024, Prof. Goldberg received an appointment from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland to a five-year term on the Program Board of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Poland.

Prof. Jeff Holdeman (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures) was awarded the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Mentor Award.

Prof. Marianne Kamp’s (Central Eurasian Studies) new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan will be published in December 2024 with Cornell University Press. In August, Prof. Kamp also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Convening Grant for “Central Asians Remember 1991,” a collaborative oral history project involving scholars from the US, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

Prof. Jerzy Kolodziej (Emeritus, Slavic Languages and Literatures) is author of the recently published Trees on the Moon: A Book of Poems (Alinea, 2024).

Prof. Svitlana Melnyk (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures), together with PhD candidate Iryna Voloshyna (Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology), developed the Ukrainian Language and Culture module series with funding from IU’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). Prof. Melnyk delivered a talk called “Language-in-Education policy of Ukraine in Wartime” for the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Edmonton, Canada in July. She also presented “Backward design: Experience in teaching an intensive language course” for an international conference on philological studies and translation discourse in Ukraine and “The Influence of War on Language Culture in Academic Discourse: Foreign Experience” for the Institute of the Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s conference “The Culture of the Ukrainian Language in the Integrative Socio-Humanitarian Paradigm.”

Prof. Anya Peterson Royce (Department of Anthropology) was one of four participants in the hour-long performance of “A Poem of Edges and Centers, Courage and Amazement” at the Academy in Limerick. The poem was written for a celebration of the work of Oscar Mascarenas at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in Limerick. She was also invited to do two photographic exhibits in Ennis, Colorado, featuring her photos of 1840’s “famine cottages” along the west coast of Ireland.

Dr. Jessica Storey-Nagy (Department of Anthropology, REEI) presented her paper “Complexity and Change as Constant: De-nationalizing and De-colonizing East European Area Studies” at the University of Tartu’s 8th Annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Area Studies, and also presented “Utilizing Mediated Publics of Trust: Countering Disinformation in Hungary” at the APLA/AES Spring Conference on Repair at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Storey-Nagy also published “All IU Faculty, Staff, and Students Are ‘Safe,’ But Some Are Safer Than Others: The Discursive Stylings of an Authoritarian Campus Administration,” in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Online in August 2024.

Veronika Trotter (IU Libraries) and colleagues Maria Gorbunova, Olga Makarova, Liladhar Pendse, and Megan Bennett have composed LibGuides to Ukrainian Studies and Russian Studies for the Association of College & Research Libraries.

Prof. Bronislava Volková (Emerita, Slavic Languages and Literatures) published a book of poetry, “Ti co odcházejí” with Togga Press as well as contributing 5 poems in Russian and 2 collages in “Kniga mlečnogo puti.” Prof. Volková also translated several poems, appearing in Four Centuries. Russian Poetry in Translation: “Trava,” “Moj žrebij,” “Lampadka,” and “Kogda blesnet” by Alexandr Karpenko (in Czech), “Guernica” and “Ne smotri” by Julija Pikalova (in Czech). She published, with Gustav Erhart, Andrej Belyj: Severní symfonie (1. heroická) in Czech translation in “Spolek českých bibliofilů v Praze.” She also had multiple public events this year: a poetry reading, Juditina věž, in Prague in February; a poetry reading with violin accompaniment by Alexander Shonert in March; Všude poutníkem, a collage exhibit at Za školou in Prague under the auspices of the International Pen Club in April; a commented viewing with dialogue with the artist by Robert Božkov in April; and a poetry reading at Rockport Poetry Festival, also in April. Beyond her own publications and works, Prof. Volková was also interviewed by Juan Pablo Bertazza for Radio Prague in March. Book reviews of Prof. Volková’s 2021 book, Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought, recently appeared in Tvar, Modern Language Review, and the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 4 of Prof. Volková’s poems appeared in Spanish translation in Poesía Al Descubierto (translated by María del Castillo Sucerquia), and Laura Ivins produced film clips to accompany her “Je zase den” (available in Czech and English versions). Finally, Prof. Volková was featured in a piece entitled “Vsečelovečnost‘ Bronislavy Volkovoj” by poet Aleksandr Karpenko in The Emigrant Lira: Literary and Journalistic Journal.

Prof. Timothy Waters (Maurer School of Law and Center for Constitutional Democracy) published an invited symposium post on the Ukrainian war entitled “In the Tenth Year of the War” for Völkerrechtsblog. Prof. Waters was also part of a panel with Aonghus Kelly of the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine at the Maurer School of Law on “Atrocity Crime Investigations in Gaza and Ukraine” as well as a guest lecturer on territory and reparations in Ukraine for Prof. Mitu Gulati and Prof. Andrew Hayashi’s seminar on reparations at the University of Virginia School of Law in September 2024.

Suzanne E. Ament (History PhD, 1996) recently presented a paper, “The History of Technology and Blind Riders” at the Equine History Collective conference.

Becky Craft (REEI MA/MLS, 2023) is serving as a librarian with the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, IN at its Southwest Branch.

Shoshana Keller (REEI Certificate, 1988) created a website, Mapping the Peoples of Kazakhstan, which uses Soviet census data and Geographic Information Systems to do a spatial analysis of the many nationalities of post-Stalin Kazakhstan.

Jeta Loshaj (REEI MA, 2023), Program Manager at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Kosovo, was a featured speaker at the Sarajevo Security Conference 2024 in September.

Dennis “Dini” Metro-Roland (REEI MA, 2001) is currently Professor of Educational Studies at Western Michigan University. Along with Dr. Paul Farber, he is co-author of Why Teaching Matters (Bloomsbury Press, 2020). He is also co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Ethics and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with Dr. Sheron Fraser-Burgess and Dr. Jessica Heybach.

Anna Müller (History PhD, 2010) is the newly elected president of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America.

Kristoffer Rees (CEUS/Political Science PhD, 2015) is Senior Assessment Manager at the IU Office of Collaborative Academic Programs.

Marissa Smit-Bose (CEUS MA, 2017) is a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge during the 2024-25 academic year.

Jamie Pearlman Tessier (REEI MA, 1994) is in her third year of teaching social studies at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in Deerfield, Illinois. She teaches Honors Civics, Honors Jewish History, AP US History, and Debate.