2010 – Student Awards

Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Sara Tomczuk‘s	Sara interests include memory politics and the sociology of memory. Currently, she is working on a master’s thesis exploring political memories of communism in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Her work will compare physical memory sites (such as memorials and museums) in the two nations in order to understand how the current political atmosphere influences public memory of the communist period. Her career goals include teaching at the university level.
Gordon C. Culp Fellowship	Laura Lucht	Laura discovered Russia while reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov on the school bus in the ninth grade. After earning undergraduate degrees in Linguistics and in Russian & Soviet Studies from U.C. San Diego, she decided to take her learning outside the classroom before pursuing graduate study. In this quest for life experience, she worked for two years on a sociolinguistic survey of minority language communities in Azerbaijan, and served for three years as an academic counselor at a private university in California. She now weaves together her academic and professional interests by considering scholarship as a force in ancient, recent and modern migration throughout the Silk Road region. She hopes that her current study of Kazak language will open future opportunities to facilitate student and scholar exchange to and from Central Asia.
Gross Undergraduate Scholarship	Genesee Rickel	Genesee is in her fourth year of study and is majoring in Russian Language & Literature and International Studies. She is currently researching Russian feminist critiques of Tolstoy’s treatment of the woman question in Anna Karenina, and plans to also develop a research project focusing on the use of ty and vy in Soviet and post-Soviet film. While in Sochi, she began to outline the later linguistic research project, while also further developing her Russian language skills. After college she hopes to work in the non-profit sector, focusing on human rights issues in the Caucasus.
H. Stewart Parker Endowed Fellowship	Nicole Burgund	Nicole is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her focus is on twentieth-century prose and poetry, and she’s currently working on a dissertation which takes a comparative look at different prose works dealing with the trial of recounting one’s life. She hopes to apply her continued study of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian to her dissertation research, which includes two works in BCS: Irena Vrkljan’s Marina, Or about Biography, and Meša Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish.
H. Stewart Parker Endowed Fellowship	Tyson Sadleir	Tyson is a PhD student in the Slavic Department. His interests are centered in Balkan and Kartvelian linguistics. He has studied Macedonian, Turkish and Georgian extensively and seeks to reconcile these languages through the context of Turkish linguistic influence via the Ottoman Turks. This fall Tyson Sadleir will go to Skopje to study Bulgarian and Macedonian. He is looking forward to this opportunity to study Southeast Slavic languages, which are quite unique among the Slavic languages because of the influences other Balkan languages have had on them. He hopes to learn more about these linguistic influences, and is particularly interested in the influence of Turkish on Bulgarian and Macedonian syntax. In order to help him in this goal, Tyson will study advanced Macedonian and Bulgarian for two months at the Center for Foreign Languages in Skopje, Macedonia.
H. Stewart Parker Endowed Fellowship	Karl Starns	Karl was born and raised on the Mississippi Delta, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In between eating gumbo, crawfish and surviving hurricanes, he studied history and German at Louisiana State University which fostered his interest in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. His current study interests include Russian and German relations, Russian relations with the Ottoman Empire, Great power politics in East Europe and the Balkans, and Russian foreign policy. He speaks German, can read elementary French and learns Russian. He hopes to pursue an academic career. He enjoys learning languages, good histories, good people, good conversation, good food, good comics and good times.
Titus Ellison Fellowship	Sarah Zaides	A native of Southern California, Sarah completed her BA in History at the University of California, San Diego. After graduation, she spent a significant amount of time in St. Petersburg and Moscow before returning to work for a non-profit in San Diego. A graduate student in the History Department’s MA/PhD program, Sarah is interested in the cultural, political, and ideological exchanges between Soviet Russia and the Middle East during the Cold War. She also works on Soviet Jewish identity vis-à-vis cultural production and intellectual history. In her spare time, she enjoys skiing, live music, and yoga.