Fellows Research

In its broadest scope, my research is concerned with the impact of the former Soviet Muslim republics’ changing education systems on the development of their countries’ citizens.

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Teaching Citizenship in a Post-Soviet World: Azerbaijan’s Changing Schools (81KB.pdf)

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Why are courts so fickle when it comes to human rights? Why are women’s rights supported in some countries and not in others, and why are press freedoms taken into account while members of religious minorities don’t stand a chance in courts?

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Courts and Culture: The Effects of Norms on the Development of Human Rights in the Post-Soviet World (39KB.pdf)

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This project evaluated the extent to which group identification influences social participation.

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Identity and Social Participation in the Kyrgyz Republic (44KB.pdf)

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Russia’s “Unified Electricity System” - the state owned electricity monopoly, whose origins lie in Lenin’s initiative to electrify the newly founded Soviet Union, is currently being broken up and privatized. Russians old enough to remember the Soviet period are aware of the extraordinary economic, political and symbolic importance of the electricity sector, distilled in Lenin’s equation “Communism = Soviet power + Electrification of the whole country.”

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Power and Politics: The Political Economy of Market Making in Russia’s Electricity Sector (52KB.pdf)

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The main aim of my research is to offer a partial explanation for the geography of violent death (i.e. deaths from purposeful injury and homicide) in the ex-Soviet states after the fall of communism. Triggered by the collapse of the communist party-state and the disorganization of state institutions, lawlessness and violence spread throughout the entire ex-Soviet territory.

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The Post-Soviet Geography of Violent Death (110KB.pdf)

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This research ended up going in several different directions. I conducted archival research on the early transnational connections of the musical group Kori Lira, using this group as a case study to investigate more general issues of musical change and exchange in Albania during its Rilindja Kombëtare (National Renaissance) period [1880-1912] and post-independence period [1912-1939].

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Cultural Circuits in Southeast Europe: Kori “Lira” of Korça, Albania (38KB.pdf)

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Bulgaria was the first European country to develop a National Biological Diversity Conservation Strategy (USAID 2006) and to create a National Ecotourism Strategy and Action Plan (NETSAP 2004). Because Bulgaria joined the European Union in January 2007, Westernization and mass tourism are just materializing. The Bulgarian Ministries of Economy, Environment and Water, and Agriculture and Forests developed NETSAP as an initiative to market sustainable nature conservation programs, local traditions, and cultural sites in the emerging trend of globalization.

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Monitoring human disturbance from increased ecotourism on wild bird populations in Central Balkan National Park, Bulgaria (pdf)

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The activities and conflicts of Volga-Ural Muslim elites in late imperial Russia; ways in which the subjects and strategies of these conflicts and the outlook of the elites themselves changed with the changing political circumstances in Russia from 1905 to 1920; Specifically, it examines 1) the evolution of narratives of community history; 2) the debate over the essential traits of the community; 3) the community’s place (and the place of its individual members) within the empire and the ideal relationship between the community and the state.

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Mullahs, Intellectuals, Politicians & the Struggle for Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Volga-Ural Muslim Society (74KB.pdf)

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In the decades after the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks reclaimed the territories of the extinct Russian empire and waged an all-out assault on religion. While they failed to eliminate faith from their lands, they fatally wounded Islamic structures that had guided Central Asian spiritual and worldly affairs alike since the Mongol invasion.

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International Islam and Religious Identity in Central Asia (44KB.pdf)

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