2012 – Student Awards

Boba Summer Research Fellowship	Elizabeth Zherka	Elizabeth is a UW alumna, having earned her Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude, in European Studies from the Jackson School in 2008. Her minor was Women Studies and she received a Certificate in European Union Studies from the Center for West European Studies. Elizabeth is a dual citizen with the UK and the US, and has traveled extensively in Europe. She is currently pursuing her MAIS, as well as a certificate in International Development Policy and Management from the Evans School of Public Affairs. She has held TA positions in the Jackson School and the Political Science department, and is teaching a course on modern European culture in the Experimental college in 2012. Elizabeth was awarded the Boba fellowship for the summer of 2011, which helped support her costs to travel to Kosovo, where she conducted empirical research for her thesis as well as held an internship with Iniciativa Progresivë. Her thesis is focused on post-conflict civil society and capacity building in the Former Yugoslavia, specifically whether local women’s non-governmental organizations in post-conflict Kosovo have built human security.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Alexey V. Belyayev	Alexey received a FLAS award for the summer of 2011. He used this award to study intensive Polish in Pittsburgh, which he enjoyed immensely. A native of Omsk, Russia, Alexey came with his family to America in 2004, gained citizenship, and received his BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He began his first year at the Jackson School of International Studies, REECAS in 2011 and is currently looking at trade between Russia, Eastern Europe, Germany and the United States.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Marleyse Borchard	Prior to entering the Masters in International Studies Program, Maryleyse worked in program development to increase collaboration in public health. She holds a Masters in Public Health from the UW and her current research interests are transnational health and issues of statelessness. Marleyse is studying Russian language in order to better understand the history and current issues that face Russia within its own region and in the international sphere.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Nicola Castle-Bauer	Nicole is a sophomore in the Jackson School majoring in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian studies, focusing on forced migration and the changing social and political position of ethnic minorities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the Caucasus. She loves to travel and to immerse herself in foreign languages, and hopes to continue to do both for the foreseeable future.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Eric Damiana	Eric is a Master’s candidate in the Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies program. He is currently writing his thesis on human trafficking discourses in the Russian Federation and the Czech Republic. Eric received a FLAS Summer Fellowship, studying Russian language in Saint Petersburg, Russia for two months in the summer through the School of Russian and Asian Studies. While there, he also completed two translation projects for SRAS as a part of his program.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Indra Ekmanis	Indra is a first-year master’s student focusing on the Baltic States and Latvia in particular. She graduated with a BA in global studies and a minor in German from Arizona State University. Indra spent two months as an intern with the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riga and was fortunate enough to interview former President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and dissident singer Ieva Akuratere for her undergraduate research on the Latvian Singing Revolution. She also worked as a counselor at Kursa, a Latvian summer school in Shelton, Washington, to prepare herself for the change in climate when moving from Arizona to Seattle. Indra hopes to return to Latvia this summer to study the impact of nationalism on youth and politics.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Eric Johnson	Eric is a graduate student in the History department, studying Imperial Russia and Central Asia. He is currently finishing his MA degree and plans to continue to earn his PhD at the University of Washington. His focus is on the relations between ethnic-Russian, Orthodox populations and ethnic-Turkic, Muslim populations in the Volga region and Central Asia during the 18th and 19th century. His MA research has been particularly focused on the city of Kazan, which embodied many of these issues in microcosm. He hopes to apply the knowledge he gains to develop richer, historically-informed understandings of the complex ethnic dynamics of the modern-day Russian Federation and Central Asian nations. He is applying the fellowship assistance to the study of Kazak. Given the language’s close relationship to Tatar (and cognizant of the significant cultural interchange between the Tatar and Kazak communities historically), this should prove doubly useful in accessing Kazak and Tatar language primary sources for both the Central Asian steppe and the Volga basin.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Wes Kovarik	Wes is originally from Vancouver, Canada and graduated from UC San Diego in 2009 with a degree in International Studies. His undergraduate interests included nationalism and ethnicity, extractive industries, and geopolitics. At the University of Washington he is pursuing a Juris Doctor and a Masters in International Studies. His language training in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian allows him to research security, trade, and financial regulation agreements affecting the region. His current academic interests include international law, nuclear security, and energy development.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Sascha Schilbach	Sascha received his BA in Russian Language and International Studies at Willamette University in 2010. After a stint in Estonia, on Sakhalin Island and in the Crimea, he was thrilled to return to Russia this summer. A recipient of the Summer FLAS Scholarship, Sascha spent the summer studying Russian language at Vladivostok State University of Service and Economics. His academic interests include Russia’s foreign policy, Russia’s Arctic developments and Russian domestic politics.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Nicholas Steiner	Nicholas recently received his BA in International Studies from Wittenberg University and is currently pursuing an MA in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. An NSEP Scholarship recipient, Nicholas studied Uyghur at the Minzu University of China in Beijing while conducting research on minority education and the social dynamics of Turkic minorities in urban China. Nicholas is using his FLAS to continue studying Uyghur. His primary interest lies in comparing Turkic communities throughout post-Soviet Central Asia, China, and Turkey as they range between permanency and diaspora, and examining what fosters imagined or reconstituted identities within them.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Anne Thorsteinson	Anne is originally from Juneau, Alaska and graduated from the University of Washington in 2006 with a degree in Russian Language and History. After teaching English abroad in Budapest, Hungary and traveling through Eastern Europe, she returned to Seattle to work in the travel industry, designing private tours to Russia and the former Soviet countries. Anne spent the summer of 2011 studying Russian language at Vladivostok State University of Service and Economics. Her academic interests lie in economics and natural resource management issues in Russia and Central Asia.
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship	Elizabeth Zherka	Elizabeth is a UW alumna, having earned her Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude, in European Studies from the Jackson School in 2008. Her minor was Women Studies and she received a Certificate in European Union Studies from the Center for West European Studies. Elizabeth is a dual citizen with the UK and the US, and has traveled extensively in Europe. She is currently pursuing her MAIS, as well as a certificate in International Development Policy and Management from the Evans School of Public Affairs. She has held TA positions in the Jackson School and the Political Science department, and is teaching a course on modern European culture in the Experimental College in 2012. Elizabeth holds a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. Her thesis is focused on post-conflict civil society and capacity building in the Former Yugoslavia, specifically whether local women’s non-governmental organizations in post-conflict Kosovo have built human security.
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.
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.
Undergraduate Gross Fellowship	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 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.