Who We Are | National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER)

Who We Are

Board of Directors

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Maria Carlson

Chair
University of Kansas

Maria Carlson is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and courtesy professor of history at the University of Kansas. Her research and teaching interests are broadly interdisciplinary and include Russian intellectual history, literature, culture, and Slavic folklore. She specializes in counter-mainstream philosophical, religious, and occult movements in Russia; her publications engage the fields of Russian symbolism as a philosophical and religious world view, occultism, Slavic folklore, and the arts in Russia.

From 1992 to 2003 Carlson served as director of the US/ED Title VI National Resource Center for Russian & East European Studies at the University of Kansas. During this time she worked extensively on grant projects that support educational development, language proficiency testing, public administration training, student exchanges, small business development, resource center support, archival access, and educational outreach. She developed new programs and brought in more than $6 million in research and project funding. In 2000 Carlson received the Distinguished Service Award for Academic Leadership from the International Relations Council for her many initiatives on behalf of international education. She has served or currently serves as board member for a number of national agencies in the field, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dante Fascell Board at the U.S. Department of State, the Council of National Resource Center Directors, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, among others.

Professor Carlson has received individual research awards from IREX, Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hall Center for the Humanities. In 2005 she received the National Award for Excellence in Post-Secondary Teachingfrom the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. In recognition of her significant service to the University of Kansas, she was inducted into the KU Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009.

Her current projects include a series of articles on the new Russian paganism and theBook of Veles and a monograph on corporeal revenants in Slavic folk belief.

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Bruce Grant

Vice-Chair
New York University

Bruce Grant is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), a study of the Sovietization of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke 2010). His current research explores rural Muslim shrines as sites of the retelling of Soviet history in Azerbaijan; the spectacular rebuilding of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku; and a historical project on the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905-1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it.

He has been the recipient of grants from NCEEER, the American Philosophical Society, ACLS, NEH, NSF, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is a recent past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, interdisciplinary wing of the American Anthropological Association; and ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He has been a member of the NCEEER board since 2006.

Board Members

Valerie Bunce
Cornell University

Richard Combs

Ted Gerber
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Nancy Kollmann
Stanford University

Martha Lampland
University of California, San Diego

Susan Linz
Michigan State University

Mieke Meurs
American University

Douglas Northrop
University of Michigan

Joanna Regulska
Rutgers University

James Richter

Bates College

Edward Schatz
University of Toronto, Mississauga

Elizabeth Wood

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

US Staff

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Dr. David Patton

NCEEER President
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NCEEER President Dr. David Patton assumed his position in May, 2012. In addition to his role at NCEEER, David serves as a Vice President of American Councils (ACTR/ACCELS), where he has primary responsibility for oversight and senior-level management of a network of field offices and centers that now number more than 50 in 15 countries in East Europe and Eurasia. Earlier in his career, David spent eight years in Moscow as the American Councils NIS Regional Director. He also served as the Assistant Director of the Ohio State University Center for Slavic and East European Studies. David is the recipient of numerous research grants and has studied and worked in the NIS region and Central Europe since 1983.His Ph.D. is in Slavic linguistics and his primary area of research is East Slavic languages with a secondary focus on the South Slavic group. David is based in Washington, DC.

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Dana Ponte

Senior Program Officer
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NCEEER Executive Associate Dana Ponte grew up on her family's ranch in Southern Oregon, and graduated summa cum laude from the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon with a degree in Russian studies. After a year as an Americorps volunteer, Dana moved to Boston to continue her education. She is a 2005 graduate of the master's program in Russian and Central Asian Studies at Harvard, and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Higher Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dana worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies before taking her current position with the National Council in 2006. Her doctoral research concerns the development of national defense education in the Cold War period. Dana has been based in NCEEER’s Washington, DC office since 2011.

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Danielle Percich

Program Officer
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NCEEER Program Officer Danielle Percich grew up and has lived in the Seattle area for most of her life. She attended Seattle University, where she received a Bachelor's Degree in History. After graduating from college, Danielle joined the United States Peace Corps, where she served as an Organization and Development Specialist in Uralsk, Kazakhstan for two years. Before coming to NCEEER. Danielle worked at Civic Education Washington State, a local non-profit organization, as the Deputy Director in charge of financial management, outreach, personnel management, event planning, and program development.

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Stuart Goldman

Scholar-in-Residence, Washington, DC
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Stuart D. Goldman was a specialist in Russian and Eurasian affairs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress from 1979 until his retirement in 2009. CRS performs research and policy analysis for the United States Congress. Dr. Goldman was the senior CRS specialist in Russian political and military affairs. His areas of expertise include Russian domestic politics, foreign and defense policy, and U.S.-Russian relations. He has written scores of published CRS reports and hundreds of analytical memoranda on these and related subjects for Congress. His writings have appeared in Congressional Committee Prints and in scholarly and general interest publications. He lectures in the United States, Europe, and Asia and is regularly interviewed and quoted by journalists covering Russian and Eurasian affairs.

Before joining the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of CRS, Dr. Goldman was a member of the International Studies Faculty of the Pennsylvania State University (1971-1978), and an Assistant Professor of History at Wilson College (1969-1971). His academic research focused on modern diplomatic and military history and Soviet-Japanese relations.

A native of New York City, Goldman received his B.A. from Brooklyn College (1964), M.A. from Colgate University (1965), and Ph.D. from Georgetown University (1970), majoring in history at all three institutions. In 1972 he was selected as one of the first Japan Foundation Fellows and spent one year in Tokyo as an exchange scholar focusing on Soviet-Japanese conflict in the late 1930s and its connection to the outbreak of World War II. Dr. Goldman attended the National War College, 1995-1996, earning an M.S. in National Security Strategy.

Eurasia Staff

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Alexei Kharlamov

Senior Program Officer/Eurasia
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Alexei Kharlamov has been with NCEEER since January 2001 working as a Program Officer. His main responsibilities center around the Carnegie Research Fellowship Program which allows eligible Russian and Eurasian scholars to conduct research in the United States. He received his Masters Degree (MS in Education Leadership) from Drake University, Des Moines, IA in 2000. He also holds a degree in linguistics and English philology from Saratov State University, Russia (awarded in 1995). His previous job assignments include teaching in a high school in Saratov, Russia and working for Youth for Understanding International Exchange in Des Moines, IA and for Freedom House in Washington, DC. His interests span from languages and literature to travel and creative writing.

Other Staff

John Hardt
Senior Advisor
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Erin Craver
Bookkeeper
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Robert Huber in Memoriam

Robert Huber - In Memoriam, 1955 - 2011

In his thirteen years as President of NCEEER, Bob Huber was a tireless and passionate advocate for the field of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Countless of us have benefited from his professional support his generous mentoring and, most of all, his friendship.

In addition to his leadership of the Council, Bob served as a Senior Consultant for Social Science Programs to the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, an Affiliated Professor at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, and Editor of Problems of Post-Communism.

Bob came to NCEEER in 1998 as a seasoned administrator. He served as Vice-President and, later, Senior Vice-President at the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) from 1992 to 1996, and program director of the Soviet Studies Program at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1989-1992. Bob spent a significant portion of his career on Capitol Hill as a speech writer, staff director, and consultant to the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs. Bob was a principal staffer on a number of major pieces of legislation, including the International Security Assistance Act of 1979, the International Security and Development Cooperation Acts of 1980 and 1981, the Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983 (Title VIII), and several successful nuclear disarmament bills. He earned his PhD in International Relations from American University in 1987 and authored several books on Soviet-American foreign policy, as well as numerous journal articles.

Bob led major and successful efforts to increase funding for the Title VIII Program, which supports a variety of initiatives that promote advanced research on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He was also able to initiate, through grants of several million dollars, a wide array of new research and training programs for American scholars, graduate students, and other professionals, as well as for their counterparts from the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe.

NCEEER accepts gifts to its endowment fund, in Bob’s name. Please contact Dana Ponte for further information on giving.