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The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research |
About Programs Projects Papers Partners Links Subscribe Who We Are |
| Scholar | Affiliation | Project Title | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hilary Appel | Claremont McKenna College | The Politics of Eastern European Tax Reform | This project investigates the interplay of domestic and international political factors shaping East European tax policymaking. It will fill a gap in the literature on post-Communist taxation by explicitly examining the political dimensions of tax reform. |
| Nicholas Breyfogle | The Ohio State University | Baikal: The Great Lake and its People | This project is an environmental history of Siberia's Lake Baikal region (17th-20th cc.). By exploring the relationship between humans and Baikal (both cultural and socio-economic) over this extensive historical period, the project contextualizes Soviet-era environmental traumas, analyzes broad patterns found at the nexus of Russians and the environment, and discusses the development of Russian conservation efforts. Using the lens of Baikal and the methodologies of environmental history, the study also sheds new light on questions of colonial contact, economic development, Russian identity, and the evolution of science and the sacred in Eurasia. |
| Kate Brown | University of Maryland | Enriched by Plutonium: The Tandem History of the Secret Cities that Plutonium Built | "Enriched by Plutonium" is a history of two communities and landscapes transformed by plutonium production from 1943-1989. The study focuses on the American and Soviet cities (Richland, WA and Cheliabinsk-40) that were created in the mid to late forties exclusively to house operators of the new plutonium plants. The cities were model communities and also charted new paths in creating security regimes to secure nuclear secrets from enemies and knowledge of radioactive emissions from residents. |
| John S. Earle | W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research | Start-ups and Economic Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine in Comparative Perspective | We assess the contributions of the new private sector to aggregate productivity growth in six transition economies. The data are long panels on all manufacturing firms. A comparative analysis investigates the relationships of patterns of experimentation, learning, and selection to the diverse policy and business environments in these economies. |
| Timothy Frye | Columbia University | Russia and the Rule of Law under Putin | This project will survey 500 firms in eleven regions to identify social, political and economic factors shaping the legal regime in Russia. This survey repeats questions posed in 2000 and 2005 and will offer a comprehensive view of the rule of law under Putin. |
| Jehanne M. Gheith | Duke University | A Dog Named Stalin: Memory, Trauma, and the Gulag | This project is a study of the Gulag based on life-history oral accounts--multiple interviews I have conducted over ten years with Gulag survivors and their children. The study is organized around three themes: 1) the effects of about fifty years of enforced silence on individual memory and family structures; 2) public mourning and memorialization; and 3) the ways in which the category of trauma must be modified to suit the Russian context. |
| Zvi Gitelman | University of Michigan | Dimensions of the Holocaust in the USSR: Policies, Perceptions, Paradoxes | The Holocaust in the USSR was perceived and acted upon very differently by three groups: the Soviet government, Jewish combatants, and some citizens who turned against their state and neighbors. Using archival, memoir, and oral history evidence, this project illustrates very different uses of the events by these actors and analyze their consequences. |
| Henry Hale | George Washington University | Succession Politics and Public Opinion in Russia 2007-08 | The researchers will survey 1,575 Russians to improve understanding of how state-citizen relationships drive or constrain dynamics in 'hybrid-regimes', particularly during the crucial periods of leadership succession like that widely expected in Russia in 2007-2008. The survey will be conducted between Russia's parlimentary and presidential elections in 2007-2008. |
| Sarah L. Henderson | Oregon State University | Civil Society in Russia: State-Society Relations in the Post-Yeltsin Era | The present study proposes to evaluate the impact of President Putin's "reforms" on Russia's civil society. Drawing primarily from survey data culled from ten regions, the study assesses how reforms have changed NGOs' legal environment, their advocacy abilities, and their abilities to provide goods and services to their constituencies. |
| Kathryn Hendley | University of Wisconsin, Madison | Mobilizing Law in Russia | This project explores the role of law as a problem-solving strategy. Surveys have repeatedly confirmed Russian antipathy towards law, but have focused mostly on attitudes rather than behaviors. Through a series of focus groups and follow-up interviews, Dr. Hendley will study how disputes evolve, examining what factors motivate or discourage legal action. The results will provide a more accurate picture of Russian legal culture and how the rule of law evolves. |
| Sonia Hirt | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | Iron Curtains: The Proliferation of Walled-Off Spaces in Belgrade and Sofia in the Post-Communist Era | This project examines the recent proliferation of walled-off urban spaces in Belgrade and Sofia. It hypothesizes that the spread of walls is the physical manifestation of certain cultural shifts which have come to characterize Balkan society since 1990: a widespread sense of insecurity, growing individualism, mistrust of collective experiences and the decline of the collective realm. |
| Eugene Huskey | Stetson University | Why Do Opposition Elites Fail to Cooperate? Kyrgyzstan and the Postcommunist Experience | The study analyzes the impediments to cooperation by opposition elites in postcommunist Kyrgyzstan. It seeks explanations for the failure of collective action in structural factors--such as the ideational, institutional, and economic environment--as well as in governmental tactics designed to fracture or coopt the opposition. |
| Tomasz Inglot | Minnesota State University-Mankato | Continuity and Change in Family Policies of the New European Democracies: A Comparison of Poland, Hungary, and Romania | This project will compare and contrast family policies and programs of the three new East European democracies--Poland, Hungary, and Romania. It will analyze similarities and variations in the institutions and historical legacies (path-dependence), the national discourses, and the political and socioeconomic factors behind the reforms of these policies (path-departure) in the three countries. |
| Charles Ingrao | Purdue University | The Scholar's Initiative Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: II | Western and successor state scholars will deepen and broaden joint reseach on the Yugoslav conflicts, giving special focus to the dynamics and public representation of multicultural coexistence. Findings will be published in a new scholarly collection and single reports for public schools, posted on continuously updated SI websites, presented in public forums, and disseminated by news media throughout the successor states. |
| Grigory Ioffe | Radford University | The Poorly-Illuminated Periphery of Europe: The Geography of Russia's Shrinking Population | The project will produce the improved 2025 population projection for Russia as a whole and for three case-study regions under various migration scenarios; probe attitudes to and estimates of internal migration and immigration; and uncover socio-economic implications of the ongoing population decline. |
| Valentina Izmirlieva | Columbia University | Christian Hajjis: The Forgotten Pilgrims to Ottoman Jerusalem | This project examines Balkan Christian pilgrims to Ottoman Jerusalem who took as their model the Muslim Hajj to Mecca. By comparing these "hajjis" with Russian "palmers", it identifies major distinctions between Orthodox practices within and outside the Islamic world and rethinks Muslim-Christian interactions in terms of cooperation and religious creativity. |
| Debra Javeline | University of Notre Dame | After Violence: Participation over Retaliation in Beslan | We examine when experiences with violence fuel greater acceptance of violence versus nonviolent participation in politics. We use surveys of 1098 victims of the Beslan school hostagetaking, surveys of nonvictim residents of Beslan and Vladikavkaz, and focus groups of active and inactive Beslan victims. |
| Austin Jersild | Old Dominion University | Stalin's Ghost in China: Soviet Reform, American Consumerism, and Chinese Nativism, 1945-1960 | The exploration of cultural exhibits in the 1950s provides insight into the problem of global consumerism in the Soviet context, and the dilemmas this posed for Sino-Soviet relations and the evolution of reform in the Soviet Union. Chinese nativism in part emerged from the extraordinary encounter with the Soviet world that made up the 'Great Friendship' forged by Mao and Stalin in February 1950. |
| Emily Johnson | University of Oklahoma | Private Correspondence from the Soviet GULAG: Intimate Communication and Family Relationships in a Time of Terror | This project considers the role that correspondence played in the lives of Stalin-era GULAG inmates and their relatives, the way the camp mail system functioned, and also what the letters themselves, as material traces of imperfect, censored acts of communication, reveal about the flow of information through Soviet society. |
| Eileen Kane | Connecticut College | Russian Hajj: Imperialism and the Pilgrimage to Mecca | This research focuses on the hajj in imperial Russia (1801-1917). The project goal is two-fold: to reconstruct the role played by Russian officials in the Caucasus in facilitating the hajj from Russia and to explore Muslim responses to the Russian state's intervention in the hajj. |
| Erin Koch | University of Kentucky | Humanitarianism as Politics: Internally Displaced Persons, Health, and Citizenship in the Republic of Georgia | This anthropological project investigates health effects of war and displacement in Georgia, and cultural and political impacts of aid projects for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Research using semi-structured interviews and participant observation will be conducted among aid agencies, Government officials, and IDPs living in collective centers and housing settlements. |
| Hiroaki Kuromiya | Indiana University | The Great Terror in Ukraine: A Collection of Archival Documents | The project is to identify, collect, annotate, and publish new archival documents that illuminate the Great Terror in Ukraine and in the USSR, and in the process, to examine Soviet foreign and domestic intelligence and their implications for international politics today. |
| Gary Marker | SUNY Stony Brook | Mazepa and the Preachers: Religious Discourse, Ukrainian Clerks and the Origins of the Russian National Identity | This is a study of Ukrainian-educated clerics who went to work in the Russian church hierarchy during the time of Peter the Great. The study focuses on issues of clerical patronage and political loyalties between the Ukrainian Hetman(Mazepa) and the Tsar, and their collective sense of identity in the wake of the Mazepa's "betrayal" of 1708. |
| Juliana Maxim | University of San Diego | Architecture and Collectivization: The Village Museum under Communism, Bucharest, 1940-1970 | This proposal is for five months of research in Bucharest to document the history of the "Village Museum" of folk architecture (now the National Villages Museum 'Dmitrie Gusti') between 1948 and 1970. The project is the first attempt to examine how the institution's ethnographic and museographic practices were closely tied to larger cultural and economic policies of the communist regime, such as collectivization and mass-housing. |
| James Meyer | Montana State University | Turkic Worlds: Community Representation and Collective Identity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1870-1914 | Dr. Meyer will spend six months undertaking archival research in Baku, Tbilisi, Moscow, Ufa, and Kazan, allowing him to address various questions which have arisen following his most recent research in the region. These issues relate to an ongoing research project concerning community leadership politics within Muslim populations of the Russian Empire and the triangular relationship between the tsarist government, Muslim community leaders, and Muslim populations more generally. |
| Mary Neuberger | University of Texas at Austin | Inhaling Modernity: Tobacco Production and Consumption in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Bulgaria | This book project is a cultural history of production and consumption of tobacco in Bulgaria from the 1850s-present. Throughout this period tobacco grew to play a critical role in the Bulgarian economy as well as the global tobacco industry, while its consumption was a perpetual subject of cultural imaginings and social critique. |
| Serguei Alex. Oushakine | Princeton University | Through "Convulsions and Calculations": Normalizing Postcolonial Authoritarianism in Eurasia | The project traces indigenous forms of rationality and intellectual critique through which urban groups in Belarus' and Kyrgyzstan explain and normalize their authoritarian regimes. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork in these countries, this project seeks to understand how postcolonial themes are used to create new affective links and discussive networks. |
| Paula M. Pickering | College of William and Mary | Untangling International Efforts to Promote Good Local Governance in the Balkans | This research features conducting interviews and gathering socio-economic and election data to understand the community impact of internationally sponsored decentralization programs in post-war former Yugoslavia. Interviews with donors, implementers, domestic officials, and citizens in Bosnian localities that have improved their local governance will uncover conditions that facilitate the international-domestic partnerships necessary for successful reform. |
| Ethan Pollock | Brown University | Without the Bania We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse | "Without the Bania We Would Perish" tells the history of the Russian bathhouse paying particular attention to its roles as a symbol of Russianness, as a sacred space, as a reflection of Russian ideas about health, hygiene and the body, and as a site of sexuality and heightened intimacy. |
| William Pyle | Middlebury College | Rights to Land in Urban Russia: Causes and Consequences of Existing Patterns | By exploring recent variation across both firms and geographic space with respect to urban land ownership and access, the project will explore the causes and consequences of different patterns of land rights in a post-communist setting. |
| Thomas F. Remington | Emory University | "Silent Heroes": State and Middle Class in Contemporary Russia | This project seeks, first, to characterize the size, composition and dynamics of the contemporary Russian middle class through secondary analysis of existing survey research and official statistical data, and, second, to study four Russian regions in depth to determine whether and how government policies affect the middle class’s development. |
| Douglas Rogers | Yale University | Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia | This project entails seven months of ethnographic research exploring the collaboration between state agencies and the oil company Lukoil on “social and cultural projects” in the Russian Perm Region. This research will describe and analyze the ways in which citizens, state forms, and corporations are mutually constituted in a postsocialist petrostate. |
| Yuri Slezkine | University of California, Berkeley | Moscow’s House of Government | This book will provide a view of the Russian Revolution from a unique vantage point: the apartment building in which the revolutionaries lived. It will identify the roots of the revolution’s demise within the family and suggest parallels to other millenarian movements as well as the reasons for the peculiar failure of the Bolshevik true believers to extend their faith beyond the “old generation.” |
| Kathleen E. Smith | Georgetown University | 1956: Moscow's Silenced Spring | This study explores the rise and fall of political and cultural liberalization in Russia in the pivotal year of 1956. The author analyzes 1956 as one of many cycles of reform and retreat that have characterized Russia's uneven progress towards democracy, and the lasting political impact of 1956. |
| Lisa Walker | US Department of Health and Human Services | Scientists, Medicine, and the Settling of the Soviet Far East | This project examines the role of scientists and officials in the events surrounding the emergence of Far Eastern tick-borne encephalitis in the 1930s-40s. This research will be expanded later into a book-length project on the relationship between science and official policy during Stalin-era expansion and manipulation of the physical environment in the USSR. |
| Alexei Yurchak | University of California - Berkeley | Global St. Petersburg: Contesting Aesthetics, Politics, and Citizenship in a Post-Socialist Metropolis | This project analyzes the dynamics of power relations in contemporary Russia through the prism of debates over the future architectural image of St. Petersburg and who has the right and power to decide that future. It examines how the city's aesthetic image and its relation to the identity of its citizens have emerged today at the center of Russia's dramatic political confrontations between authoritative state power, corporate actors, and independent civic organizations. |
| Jane Zavisca | University of Arizona | Housing Divides: The Causes and Consequences of Housing Inequality in Russia | This project analyzes the dynamics of power relations in contemporary Russia through the prism of debates over the future architectural image of St. Petersburg and who has the right and power to decide that future. It examines how the city's aesthetic image and its relation to the identity of its citizens have emerged today at the center of Russia's dramatic political confrontations between authoritative state power, corporate actors, and independent civic organizations. |
| William Zimmerman | University of Michigan | Russian Foreign Policy Elite Perspectives 2008: Identity, Interests and Preferences | Using elite interviews, this project assesses: the stability of preferences about Russia's political economy; whether the homogenization of foreign policy perspectives persists and the implications for correlation between domestic and foreign policy perspectives; whether conception of Russia's national interest has broadened with increase in political capacity. |
| Scholar | Affiliation | Project Title | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jane Burbank | New York University | Imperial Trajectories: Law and Belonging in the Province of Kazan | This research project is a study of the qualities of justice, authority, and affiliation expressed and enacted through legal institutions in a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional province in late imperial Russia. |
| Victoria Clement | Western Carolina University | Building Civil Society in Turkmenistan, 1990-2009 | This study of grassroots local initiatives examines the condition of post-Soviet Turkmenistan, and more broadly, achievements in the areas related to education and youth. |
| Kelly Cormier | Independent Scholar | From Coping Strategies to Norms: Contracting Practices in the Kazakh Fruit and Vegetable Sector | In cooperation with USAID's Office of Economic Growth for Central Asia, Dr. Cormier will undertake the following research objectives: first, to identify what practices Kazakh vegetable growers and processors are adopting in order to cope with the uncertainty they face when operating in an 'emerging' market economy; second, to assess, over time, how coping strategies become codified customs or norms; and third, to explore how emergent formal rules designed to govern transactions in the agricultural sector, and the property relations they create, have influenced relationships between processors and producers. The project will describe and analyze the evolution of commercial transacting in the Kazakh agricultural sector in order to inform the policy and scholarly discourses about the process of institutional change in the aftermath of rapid and broad economic and legal reforms. |
| Emily O'Dell | University of Oklahoma | The Teaching, Practice, and Political Role of Sufism in Dushanbe | This project analyzes the teaching of Sufism at the Islamic University in Dushanbe, investigating the practices and rituals of Sufi communities and analyzing the devotion of these Sufi followers. Sufi attitudes toward the growing influence and exclusionism of the Salafis in Tajikistan and the relationship of both sects to the politics of Tajikistan are also examined. |
| Gulnaz Sharafutdinova | Miami University | Asymmetric Federalism and Property Rights in Russia | This project targets the issue of property rights by examining linkages between federalism and the stability of property rights in postcommunist Russia. Based on fieldwork in Russian regions, we assess whether asymmetric federal arrangements have strengthened or undermined Russia's newly-emerging property rights. |
| Scholar | Affiliation | Project Title | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maria Bucur | Indiana University | The Everyday Experience of Women's Emancipation in the U.S. and Romania in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: A Transnational Study | The localized details of the broad picture of women's empowerment over the twentieth century offer much foor for critical thought: while women's participation in local and national politics is on the rise in the United States, in Romania, a member of the European Union, the presence of women in politics remains marginal. In the 2008 Parilamentary elections their proportion declined to less than 4% and a similar trend marked local elections. Thus, it is important to reconsider in broad comparative terms and also local detail what gender empowerment has meant over the past century. This project seeks to bring out the voices of women of several generations from Hunedoara, a rural-urban region of Romania, through life stories that will help us better understand what women's emancipation means at the localized level. These narratives will be placed in dialogue with a smiliar undergoing project, focused on a rural-urban community in the United States, in order to enable scholars and policy-makers to better understand the relationship between gender politics writ large and politics writ small in this transnational context. |
| Scholar | Affiliation | Project Title | Summary | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laura Adams | Harvard University | The Politics of World Heritage in Uzbekistan | This project proposes to conduct interviews, observations, and documentary research on the "Cultural Space of the Boysun District", a district in Uzbekistan that UNESCO has designated as a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity". This research will build on previous work on the globalization of culture in Central Asia and will elaborate the theory of global cultural fields (Adams 2008) by examining the case of world heritage sites. In seeking to understand how universalistic ideologies allow local artists to translate their cultural capiral across mutliple fields of culture proeuction, this project explores three main topics: the epistemology of universalism, the mapping of local, national, and global cultural fields in Uzbekistan, and the role of the state in mediating relationships between local actors and international institutions. | ||||
| T. David Curp | Ohio University | The Narrow Gate? Religion, Alienation, and Solidarity at the Catholic University of Lublin in People's Poland | This project focuses on Catholic University of Lublin students in the classes of 1948, 1960, 1972, 1974, and 1980 who studied philosophy and history. The goal is to write a social history of the careers of these students to understand the evolution of Catholic culture and politics in People's Poland. | ||||
| Alan De Young | University of Kentucky | Growing Up Kyrgyz: Social and Economic Uses of the University in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan | This is a continuing study of student subcultures in five different universities in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which began in 2007. It is focused upon how students choose university specializations (professional expectations and hopes), and how they use the universities as social and cultural sites. | ||||
| Angelina Ilieva | University of Chicago | Under Western Eyes: Balkan Identities and the Western Gaze | This project will investigate the complex relationship between South East European self-representations and Western scrutiny of this region. In particular, it will examine how nations internalize Western judgments as normative in their aspirations for recognition and acceptance, and how internalizing the Western gaze becomes central to the way that identities are formed and negotiated in the Balkans. | ||||
| Jane Knox-Voina | Bowdoin College | Interethnic Relations between Kazakhs and Russians as Reflected in Kazakh Film | This new stage of research on Kazakh and Russian Kazakh filmmakers examines interethnic relations reflected in films that address centuries-old attitudes of Russians toward Central Asians, namely that, exotic and primitive, they lived in empty spaces without history, without culture, and therefore need a guiding hand from Russians for "civilization" and protection (even in today's world). | ||||
| Andrew Konitzer | Samford University | Party Change and the Evolution of Party Constellations in the Western Balkans | This project explores the causes behind the success or failure of Serbian and Croatian parties to adopt new identities within the context of the two countries' respective bids for European Union (EU) membership. The study brings Schimmelfennig's theory of party constellations and compliance into dialog with the literature on party adaptation in an effort to explain how different pro-European party constellations as parties attempt to respond to new electoral conditions shaped by EU conditionality. | ||||
| Susan J. Linz | Michigan State University | Job Satisfaction in Transition Economies | This project involves travels to Yerevan and Belgrade in May 2009 to (1) present the preliminary job satisfaction results of the employee survey to interested members of the business, government, and academic communities, (2) to conduct in-depth interviews with CEOs and HR personnel to domestic and foreign-owned firms in order to gather the requisite qualitative data on policies utilized to create/sustain/enhance job satisfaction, and (3) gather information on existing programs to assist workers to find appropriate jobs. | ||||
| Martha C. Merill | Independent Scholar | The Globalization of Quality Assessment Standards: Two Case Studies in Kyrgyzstan | In the last few years, quality assessment criteria and processes in higher education have become more standardized internationally, due in part to the increased mobility of the global labor force. However, few case studies have been done to learn what happens when criteria and processes developed in one culture are implemented in another. The proposed research focuses on two cases of such quality assessment transfer in the Kyrgyz Republic: the American University in Central Asia's pursuit of US accreditation through the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges, and a two-year project by thirteen Kyrgyz institutions to "tune" or standardize among them the learning outcomes in eleven disciplines, using procedures developed in the Tuning Educational Structures in Europe Project, which is part of the Bologna Process. | ||||
| Manu P. Sobti | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Building and Rebuilding the Palimpsest of Urban Memory: The Evolution of Urban Spaces in Early-Medieval Samarqand and Bukhara | The genesis of urban spaces within the city has been an area of growing interest to architectural historians. However, within the Islamic cultural sphere, not only has the concept of urban public space been thoroughly contested, but seldom researched to elaborate in its evolution across time and space. This book research project argues that Islamic urban space may be effectively examined through the careful sifting of multiple 9th and 10th century textual sources, in combination with innovative fieldwork. | ||||
| Russell Zanca | Northeastern Illinois University | An Ethnographic Study of Uzbek Labor Migration from the Ferghana Valley | Initiate a long-term study on Uzbek labor emigration to Russia by working in Namangan Province, Uzbekistan, an area where labor migrants start out. The focus of this initial study centers on a micro-level village perspective regarding popular outlooks toward migration as a key to economic survival. | ||||
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