September 2024
To all:
Greetings from New York City and 19 University Place! We are very excited to be back on campus again with all of our affiliated faculty, students, and fellows. We look forward to welcoming the general public to our space soon for our first event of the semester on September 19 (see more details below).
Last year was another eventful one, with a packed schedule of over 70 events, including our ongoing NYC Russia Public Policy Series, 19v Series, and our second annual Undergraduate and MA Research Symposia. From book talks to panels, our programming covered a wide variety of topics. We hosted scholars focusing on topics ranging from the Russian security services and the war in Ukraine to Buryat Studies and much more. We also hosted readings with poets and artists including Iryna Shuvalova, Alevtyna Kakhidze, and others. We continue to be grateful to you, our audience, for your engagement and support, both online and in person. We are looking forward to seeing you soon in person and on Zoom!
In light of Russia's continuing unjust invasion of Ukraine, we remain committed to delivering insights from trusted experts to our audience seeking accurate information. We take pride in our support of researchers from across the world who are analyzing the war. We encourage you to participate in upcoming events, and welcome you to make use of our YouTube channel, where you can watch all past Jordan Center lectures on this and other topics.
We have another very full schedule of events in store for this fall. We are excited to be kicking off the semester on Thursday, September 19 at 3 pm with Dr. Dusan Bozalka, who will speak on "Merging Conspiracy with pro-Kremlin Narratives: A Mixed Method Analysis of the Biolab Narrative Reception by European QAnon Influencers."
In total, the Jordan Center will host (at least!) 17 events this semester, including:
“Goners, Grey Zones and Grandparents. Towards a new history of Gulag fiction” with Polly Jones, September 25 @ 12:30 pm
"Ecologies of the Lenin Line" with Jillian Porter, October 8 @ 3 pm
“Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World” with Erik R. Scott, October 9 @ TBA
"Voices of Babyn Yar: A Conversation with a Ukrainian Poet Marianna Kiyanovska," October 22 @ 3:30 PM
"Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" with Sheila Fitzpatrick, November 6 @ 4 pm
"From Lamaism to Buddhism: History of Buddhist Modernism in Late Imperial Russia" with Nikolay Tsyrempilov, November 13 @ 5 pm
"No Monument: Babyn Yar as Site of History, Memory, and Politics" with Victoria Smolkin, November 14 @ 4 pm
... and much more!
We are very happy to share that our Visiting Scholars program and Postdoctoral Fellowship program will continue to run this year. You can learn more about our Visiting Scholars on our website. This year's cohort of Postdocs are:
Christy Monet (Brandly), September 2023 - December 2024
Dr. Monet Brandly is a political scientist and Slavicist specializing in intellectual history as viewed from the perspectives of the history of political thought and literary studies. She conducts research and teaches in the fields of political theory, literature, and history, with a focus on Russophone political thought and its engagements with empire, liberalism, and American culture over the last two centuries. She earned her Ph.D. in both Political Science and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023. She also holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, as well as a B.A. in Political Science from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her current book project on the family novel in Imperial Russia explores the ways in which the development of liberal thought in 19th-century Russia created space for the reimagining of both the form of the family and its role in the political—a reimagining in stark contrast to the eventual removal of the family from the political in Western liberal thought. This research is based, in part, on research undertaken in both Moscow and St. Petersburg in the archives of the Russian State Library and the Pushkin House, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation and current book project have been supported by an Alfa Fellowship, a University of Chicago Harper Dissertation-Year Fellowship, an Institute for Humane Studies Publication Accelerator Grant, and a Princeton University Press Book Proposal Grant. This is her first post-doctoral academic appointment, although she previously worked for the Moscow-based publishing house Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) as an editorial assistant and translator during her graduate studies.
Mariana Irby, September 2024 - August 2025
Dr. Mariana Peixoto Irby is a postdoctoral fellow whose research explores citizenship, borders, and the politics of difference in Russia and Central Asia. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Russia and Tajikistan, her current book project focuses on Tajik labor migration to and from Russia as a lens to explore race, ethno-nationalism, and postcoloniality in the former USSR. Alongside this research, she has also engaged in activist-led projects with Central Asian migrant communities in urban Russia. Mariana earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Her research has been supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and American Councils/State Department Title VIII.
Emma Mateo, July 2024 - June 2025
Dr. Emma Mateo is a postdoctoral fellow who studies political behaviour in times of crisis, such as mass protest and war, with a regional focus on eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. Her current monograph project explores civilian responses to conflict, focusing on the case of Ukrainian mobilisation during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Drawing upon fieldwork in Ukraine and systematic analysis of local and social media data, the project investigates the actions and motivations of ordinary Ukrainians in different local contexts who engaged in the war effort as civilians. Emma also researches subnational mobilisation during mass protest, mapping and analysing local protests Belarus and Ukraine for her doctoral research. Emma’s interest in the intersection of protest, civil society, media and technology has led her to make innovative use of social media data, such as Telegram Messenger. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and Social Media + Society, and featured at major conferences and expert workshops in the US, Canada, UK, and EU. She has previously worked at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Harriman Institute, and Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology. Emma holds a PhD in Sociology (2022) and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (2018) from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Modern Languages (Russian, French and Ukrainian) from the University of Cambridge.
James Nealy, September 2024 - August 2025
Dr. James Nealy received his PhD from Duke University in May of 2022. A specialist in the economic, social, and intellectual history of the Soviet Union and the world, his writing has appeared in Kritika and Revolutionary Russia. Along with Emily Elliott he is the co-editor of the volume, under contract with Lexington Books, Soviet Workers in the World: Soviet Labor and Working-Class History in Global Context. His research and writing have been funded by, among others, the Fulbright Program, the American Historical Association, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Dr. Nealy is the recipient of three writing awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s Parker-Schmitt Award for best dissertation in European history and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Tucker-Cohen Dissertation Prize for best dissertation in the history or politics of Russia. His article, "The Shchekino Method: Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics" recently won the Contemporary European History Essay Prize and will appear in a forthcoming volume of that journal. He has previously held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University. At the Jordan Center, Dr. Nealy will continue work on his first book manuscript. Tentatively titled Making Socialism Work: Economic Reform and the Soviet Enterprise, 1950s-2000, it seeks to understand how the Soviet Union's position within the global capitalist economy affected factory-level initiatives designed to make socialism work better.
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If you haven’t yet spent time at the Jordan Center, it’s never too early to start thinking about our 2025-2026 fellowship opportunities! Visit our website to learn more, and feel free to reach out with any questions at jordan.russia.center@nyu.edu.
Finally, I would like to remind everyone that The Jordan Center Blog is always looking for pitches and submissions! Professor Maya Vinokour, blog editor, can be contacted directly at mvv221@nyu.edu. We welcome work on topics from all fields of academic inquiry relating to Russia.
If you appreciate the Jordan Center’s work and programming, online and in-person, consider making a financial contribution to help support our lectures, panels, fellowship programs, blog, and more. Any amount can help us further our goal of promoting awareness and understanding of Russia's past, present, and future, in all its disciplinary and cultural manifestations. Details can be found on our website, and as always feel free to reach out to me directly at joshua.tucker@nyu.edu.
I hope you all have a wonderful fall, and I look forward to seeing you at the Jordan Center!
Best,
Director