2026 Jordan Center Masters and Undergraduate Research Symposium

The NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia is excited to announce the schedule for our fourth annual Master’s and Undergraduate Research Symposium! This Spring, we will host 20 undergraduates and 20 master’s for two full days of presentation, discussion, networking, and exploration. This event will feature presentations on a broad array of topics on panels chaired by leading scholars in the field. See the program below!

Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP to attend. This event will not be recorded or streamed on Zoom. See location details below.

Location: 19 Washington Square North, 2nd floor.

PROGRAM

DAY ONE - Friday, March 6

9:00 - 11:00 AM - Narratives of Power: History, Ideology, and State Control

1. Vivien Horvath (Undergraduate, Concordia University) - A Fairytale Not for Everyone: Analyzing the Effects of Hungary’s Child Protection Law on Electoral Outcomes

2. Elinor Kness (Undergraduate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - Putinskaya Historia: Law, Memory, and the Nazi Ghost

3. Charlie Sagner (MA, Stanford University) - Umom Putina ne ponyat'? Understanding Russian State Ideology with Natural Language Processing

4. Yiwen Su (MA, University of Toronto) - From Imperial Dream to Public Disillusionment: Recasting the Russian Far East in Peterburgskii Listok (1903–1906)

5. Alice Volfson (MA, Harvard University) - Margins of Empire, Centers of Thought: Central Asia in the Cultural Cold War

6. Maksim Zakharov (MA, New York University) - Exporting Ideology: The Tudeh, the Iranian Revolution, and the Negotiation of Soviet Theoretical Influence, 1978–1983.

Chair: Christine Evans (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)

11:00 - 11:30 – Break

11:30 - 1:00 PM - Testimonies of the Past: Remembering Tragedy and Violence Across Eastern Europe and Eurasia

1. Baktygul Chynybaeva (MA, University of Michigan) - Women and Gendered Repression in Stalin’s Great Terror: case study ALZHIR

2. Milo Clarkson (Undergraduate, Macalester College) - Remembering the Sürgün: Tamirlar and Collective Memory in Crimean Tatar Oral Histories

3. Sophia El-Rabaa (MA, University of Arizona) - Optimism, Pessimism, and the Psychology of Survival in Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer

4. Sophie Karbstein (Undergraduate, Colgate University) - Radioactive Mutant Subjectivity: Soviet Biopolitics and Posthuman Resistance at Chernobyl and Semipalatinsk

5. Reuben Wasserman (Undergraduate, Wesleyan University) - Jewish Communities' Search for Justice in the Aftermath of the 1917-1921 Ukrainian Pogroms

Chair: Gregory Martin (New York University)

Keynote & Lunch: 1:00-2:30 PM

Keynote Speaker: Steven Solnick

Dr. Steven Solnick is the executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He has spent over three decades in the higher education, independent school, and philanthropic sectors. Throughout his career, his roots as a teacher and scholar have grounded and informed his service to a wide range of organizations and communities. Before joining the Davis Center as executive director in 2025, Steve led the Education Practice for DSG | Storbeck, a global executive search firm. Prior to joining DSG | Storbeck, Steve served for seven years as head of The Calhoun School in Manhattan, one of New York's leading progressive schools. Before Calhoun, Steve served as president of Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC — the only national liberal arts college that fully integrates work and community engagement into its curriculum. From 2002 to 2012, Steve was the Ford Foundation's country director in Moscow and then New Delhi, managing regional operations and overseeing all grant making in areas as diverse as human rights, education, poverty alleviation, public health, and the arts. In that role, Steve supported and partnered with hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and international agencies working throughout Russia and South Asia. Prior to joining the foundation, he taught Russian and comparative politics as associate professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author of Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Steve earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He also has a B.A. in politics and economics from Worcester College, Oxford University, and an S.B. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

2:30-4:00 PM - Kaleidoscopes of Being: Power, Space, and Meaning in Eastern Europe

1. Lana Belenkaia (MA, New York University) - Collection and the Fragmentation of Reality in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence And Konstantin Vaginov’s Garpagoniana

2. Nana Gongadze (MA, Harvard University) - Finery, Weaponry, Nobility: The Visual Language of Power in Elite Cossack Portraiture

3. Lucille Lorenz (Undergraduate, University of California, Berkeley) - Psycholinguistic Cartography: Taking a Walk in the Streets of Bruno Schulz

4. Jake McClure (MA, University of Toronto) - Staging National Origin in Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov and the Nomads

5. Ilya Pugachev (Undergraduate, University of Toronto) - Foo Foo Foo, Smells like a Russian Magic Tale! An Intertextual Reading of Afanasyev's Magic Tale within Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Chair: Jason Cieply (Hamilton College)

4:00-4:30 PM – Break

4:30-6:00 PM - Experiences Panel

1. Lauren Brennan (Undergraduate, College of William & Mary) - Selective Speaking: Political and Cultural Restructuring of Language Hierarchies in Georgia

2. Katharina Hass (Undergraduate, University of California, Berkeley) - 10 Frigid Days in Estonia

3. Ester Ljunggren (Undergraduate, Gustavus Adolphus College) - Nowhere and Everywhere: Language, Identity, and Belonging in Eastern Latvia

4. Zeina Nassif (Undergraduate, Wellesley College) - Восемь недели во Власти/Eight Weeks in Power: My Experience in Independent Journalism in Kazakhstan

5. Pavan Radhakrishnan (Undergraduate, UCLA) - How to personalize your study abroad experience in Eastern Europe: An ongoing case study

Chair: Alexandra Shpitalnik (New York University)

DAY TWO - Saturday, March 7

9:30 - 11:00 AM - Shifting Stories: Migration and Diaspora Experiences Across Eurasia

1. Evelyn Bagley (Undergraduate, Brandeis University) - Displaced Enmity: Migrants, Memory, and Exceptionalism on the Polish–Belarusian Border

2. Julia Lasiota (MA, Stanford University) - Poles Without Borders: Nation-making in the Polish diaspora in the Middle East and Africa, 1942-1945

3. Drake Leary & Juliette Shumway-Yurova (Undergraduate, Arizona State University) - Diaspora Perspectives on Post-Soviet Conflicts: A Qualitative Analysis of Former-Soviet Immigrants in the United States

4. Anastasija Mladenovska (Undergraduate, Miami University) - Demographic Shock and Institutional Resilience: Armenia’s Absorption of the 2023 Karabakh Exodus

5. Cali VanCleve (Undergraduate, Rhodes College) - The Key to Keeping Power over Immigrants

Chair: Ivetta Sergeeva (George Washington University / Stanford University)

11:00 - 11:30 – Break

11:30 - 1:00 PM - Iron Butterflies: How States Transform During War

1. Christopher Conway (MA, Harvard University) - Moscow Is In The Know: Mechanisms of Authoritarian Resilience in Russian Border Oblasts, 2022-2025

2. Salome Mamuladze (MA, Georgetown University) - Stolen Children and Broken Institutions: Grassroots Justice in Post-Soviet Georgia

3. Kamryn McDonald (MA, Yale) - Queer Targeting by the Russian Armed Forces in the Russo-Ukrainian War

4. Randall Rye (Undergraduate, New York University) - Russia's Expropriation Blueprint: How Foreign Owned Dual-Use Facilities Were Rapidly Converted to Support Defense Industrial Production

5. Kate Shymkiv (Undergraduate, Tufts University) - Institutionalization of Wartime Innovation: Ukraine’s Delta C4ISR System

Chair: Olena Nikolayenko (Fordham University)

1:00-2:30 Lunch & Careers Panel

2:30-4:00 PM - Negotiating Womanhood and Sexuality in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Sphere

1. Anna Ganitseva (MA, University of Kansas) - Voices of Humor: Shifting Focalization in N. Abgaryan’s Manyunya

2. Emily Kleiber (Undergraduate, St. Olaf College) - From Fantasy to Reality: The Collapse of Queer Desire in Tsvetaeva’s Letter to the Amazon

3. Manon Markosian (Undergraduate, Rutgers University) - Writing the Self into Existence: The paradox of Lydia Chukovskaya’s self-erasure and Oksana Vasyakina’s self-creation

4. Daria Sadova (MA, New York University) – Translating the Ordinary: Women’s Provincial Realism in Sofy’a Khvoshchinskaya’s Mere Mortals

5. Stella Sarefield (Undergraduate, University of Vermont) – The Maiden-to-Mother Plot: The Construction of a Female Socialist Realist Plot in Fedor Gladkov’s Cement and Elizar Mal’tsev’s Heart and Soul

Chair: Anastasiya Osipova (University of Colorado Boulder)

4:00-4:30 PM – Break

4:30-6:00 PM - Experiences Panel

1. Yana Koza (MA, University of Washington) - Speaking About War with Those Affected by It

2. Kristofers Krumins (MA, Georgetown University) - ImpactUA Internship Experience in Ukraine

3. Olivia Mitchell (MA, Harvard University) - Observations from the Bishimbayev Trial: Context for Studying GBV in Kazakhstan

4. Alexandra Pimentelli (Undergraduate, University of California, Los Angeles) - Studying Russian in Central Asia: Immersion, Identity, and Everyday Life in Kazakhstan

5. Maxim Visnovsky (MA, Columbia University) - Teaching Girls in Rural Kyrgyzstan: the Post-Soviet Legacy of the Town of Kerben

Chair: Alexandra Shpitalnik (New York University)