2004 Caucasus Regional Policy Symposium Junior Scholar Biographies
Walter Comins-Richmond is the Director of the Russian Program at Occidental College and is also affiliated with the College’s Diplomacy and World Affairs Program, in which he teaches a course on oil politics in the Caspian Basin. In summer 1996, he participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar on the history of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union at Columbia University. Since then his work has focused on the Turkic peoples of the Russian Federation, in particular the peoples of the North Caucasus. Dr. Comins-Richmond has written on Stalin’s deportations and their aftermath as well as on recent political and social developments in the Northwest Caucasus. In his most recent publication, “Legal Pluralism in the Northwest Caucasus: The Role of Sharia Courts,” Dr. Comins-Richmond addresses the issues surrounding the rising influence of Islam in the legal systems of the rural residents of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia. He received his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Southern California in 1994.
Kyle Evered is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Illinois State University. He received both his PhD and a Graduate Certificate in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oregon in 2002, and his dissertation “Romancing the Region” dealt with the varied imagery of a “Turkic World” that has emerged in Turkey since the early 1990s. Dr. Evered was awarded a 1998-1999 Fulbright grant to study political and environmental issues in Turkey. His current research focuses on contemporary constructs of Turkish nationalism and the increasing centrality of Turkey’s place in a Turkic region in the territorial, cartographic, and other special representations of the nation-state.
Elizabeth Frombgen is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at Hastings College in Hastings, NE. She earned a BA in Political Science from Western Washington University in 1995, an MA in Political Science from Purdue University in 1997, and a PhD in Political Science, focusing on Comparative Politics, from Purdue University in 2001. Her dissertation compared the secessions of Tatarstan and Chechnya in Russia. Her ongoing research programs include examining women’s political participation, focusing on the Black Widows of Chechnya.
Julie George is a Predoctoral Candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Georgia in 2002. Her dissertation examines comparative ethnic separatism in Georgia and the Russian Federation. She is the author of several articles on Georgian politics.
Armine Ishkanian is a Lecturer at the Centre for Civil Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at San Diego in 2000. Her research encompasses issues of civil society, NGOs, globalization, human rights, and gender issues in Armenia and in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Dr. Ishkanian has published several journal articles and book chapters on civil society development and gender issues, and has received fellowships from the International Research & Exchanges Board, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Research Council. Currently she is completing a book manuscript on civil society development in post-Soviet Armenia.
Asbed Kotchikian is a Predoctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Boston University and a researcher on the Eurasia Program at the Judge Institute of Management in Cambridge, UK. He spent two years (2000-2002) in the south Caucasus, where he conducted research and was a visiting lecturer at local universities, including the American University of Armenia and Yerevan State University. He has also taught courses in political science at the Riga Stradina University (Latvia) as well as at Boston University and Wheaton College in Massachusetts. His field of study is the modern political history of the post-Soviet South Caucasus (specifically Georgia and Armenia), with a focus on issues of political development, conflict resolution as well as issues of identity and transformation.
Eric Lepisto is a Predoctoral Candidate in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University in NY. Mr. Lepisto first traveled to the Caucasus in 1993 as an intern for World Learning. After serving as the organization’s Country Representative until 1996, he returned to the US to pursue his combined interests of youth, education, development, and social change. In 1998, he conducted a pilot study in Kutaisi, Georgia. His dissertation study was conducted in 2000-2002 and incorporates more than 6 years of experience in country. This spring, he expects to defend his dissertation, “A Generation of Impoverishment: Youth in Independent Azerbaijan.” Mr. Lepisto has worked for several organizations on issues related to the post-Soviet transformation and is currently the country expert for a cross-regional study on education for the National Bureau for Asian Research.
Daniel Noah Moses is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. He has a PhD in History from the University of Rochester (2001). From 2000 to 2002, he was a Civic Education Project (CEP) Fellow in Yerevan, Armenia. While there, he developed the initial ideas for the current project, “Making History: How Shaping the Past Will Determine the Future in the Caucasus and Beyond.” In the summer of 2003, Dr. Moses returned to the Caucasus with an IREX Short-Term Travel Grant. During the summer of 2004, he will be Program Coordinator for the Delegation Leaders at Seeds of Peace, a summer camp in Maine dedicated to bringing together people from conflict regions; he will also be back in the Caucasus to continue the Making History project. Meanwhile, Moses is completing a book, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Promise of America.
Eric Scott currently works at the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at American University in Washington, DC, where he manages activities in the Republic of Georgia, including research projects on organized crime, corruption, and money laundering. Prior to his employment at TraCCC, he worked in Tbilisi and traveled extensively throughout Georgia and the region. From 2000 to 2001, he was a Junior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russian and Eurasian Program. Mr. Scott received his BA in History and Russian Studies (magna cum laude) from Brown University and is presently pursuing a graduate degree in international studies.
Matthew Schmidt is a Predoctoral Candidate in Comparative Government at Georgetown University. He has an MA in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Kansas, and his research interests include democratization, international security, and globalization. He has studied at State Petersburg State University, Russia, and Concordia University's Law School in Tallinn, Estonia.
Christoph Stefes is an Assistant Professor for Comparative European & Post-Soviet Studies at the University of Colorado at Denver. He received his PhD in International Studies from the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at the University of Denver in 2002. His dissertation focuses on Georgia’s structures of corruption and their impact on the protection of citizens’ rights and liberties. He is currently completing a book in which he compares the Georgian and Armenian systems of corruption (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and is co-editing a book about Central Asia and the Caucasus with Amanda Wooden. He conducted extensive research in Georgia from 1998 until 1999 as a visiting lecturer of the Civic Education Project and continued this research in Armenia in the summer of 2003.