Ellison Center News
Anna Crowley (MAIS, 2008) left her position as Director of the IREX office in Tajikistan to become the Human Rights Officer for the OSCE's Mission in Tajikistan.
Gordana Crnkovic (Associate Professor, Departments of Slavic L&L and Comparative Literature) has published the chapter "The Border Guard's Focus and the Women's Diversions: Insights of the New Slovenian Film" in Ksenija Vidmar Horvat, ed., The Future of Intercultural Dialogue in Europe: Views from the In Between (Znanstvenoraziskovalni inštitut Filozofske fakultete Ljubljana, 2008), and also a chapter “The Poetry of Prose, the Unyielding of Sound,” in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound, Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds., University of Chicago Press. She will be giving a talk on Bosnian contemporary cinema in October in Oslo, Norway.
James R. Felak was promoted to full Professor in the Department of History and became Chair of the European Studies Program in the Jackson School of International Studies. His monograph, After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia from the End of the Second World War to the February Coup of 1948 (2009), was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. He also published an article entitled “Conflicts over the State Monopoly of Education in Slovakia, 1945-1948: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats” in the November 2008 issue of the journal Contemporary European History.
Douglas Smith's (Affiliate Lecturer, JSIS) book The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia (Yale University Press) was released in paperback this summer. Smith,, has recently signed a contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for his new book, Former People: The Destruction of the Russian Nobility, 1917-1941, to be published in 2012.
Will Lasky (MAIS, 2008) took a job working for American Councils as resident director for the National Security Language Initiative for Youth in Kazan, Russia. NSLI-Y is a scholarship program for American high school students interested in learning a critical foreign language. It is hoped that the program will foster security through cultural and language education.
Autumn Lerner (MAIS, 2002) has been named Vice President of the World Affairs Council of Seattle. As a part of her new position, she will implement the Council's three-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and lead public programming. Prior to this appointment, Lerner was the Chief Operating Officer and Director of the Council's short-term exchange program, the International Visitor Program (IVP).
Kazimierz Poznanski (Professor, JSIS) won a prestigious 2008 Toyota Fellowship to teach at the Seoul National University Graduate School of International Relations for one semester. While there, he taught "Comparative Analysis of Post-Communist Transition" and gave a faculty seminar entitled "Outcomes of Post-Socialist Transition: Russia, Eastern Europe and China."
Professor Emeritus Dan Waugh (History, JSIS and Slavic) spent nearly two months this summer on travel-study programs in China, one covering much of northern Xinjiang and the other exploring China's northern "borderlands": Ningxia (the area of the Yellow River bend), Inner Mongolia and part of Liaoning right up to the Yalu River and the border with North Korea. In November, he was in London studying collections of Central Asian antiquities in the British Museum, and gabe two talks at the University of Aberdeen. Prof. Waugh is finishing a book (with co-author Prof. Ingrid Maier of Uppsala University) on foreign news acquisition in early modern Russia and is working on a several projects relating to the Silk Road. Bonn University recently published his translation of an important monograph on the excavation of an early nomad (Xiongnu) tomb in Buriatiia. He is delighted to have received for use over the next two years a Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, which will support travel and study in the Middle East as he continues to work on a book about the Silk Road.
The Ellison Center can now be found on Facebook and Twitter @EllisonCenter! Follow us online to keep in touch and stay up to date about REECAS events in the Seattle area.
Two UW seniors researching the REECAS region were among the six recipients university-wide of the 2009 Library Research Award for Undergraduates, which recognizes University of Washington students who produce significant scholarship requiring the critical use of information resources, the library and its collections. Cameron Rule (BA Slavic L&L, 2009) received the award for his senior thesis, “Morphological Integration of Foreign Elements in Russian: Comparison of Russians in Lithuania and Estonia.” He is currently continuing his linguistic inquiry in Estonia on a Fulbright Student Fellowship. Christine Lindell (BA Slavic L&L and JSIS, 2009) was also a recipient of the award for her project “The Young and the Restless: Serbian Youth, EU Visas and the Consequences of Conditionality.” Additionally, a group project examining sovereignty issues in the Arctic – including the role of Russia – was recognized with one of five honorable mentions awarded. Slavic L&L student Kristin Olson was one of the participants in the group project. Congratulations!
Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had an opportunity this summer to learn more about their ethnic communities in Washington State through the University of Washington Libraries Special Collection's exhibit Baltic Americans in Washington State. The Latvian National Library in Riga, the Estonian National Library in Tallinn, and the Mickevičiaus Public Library in Vilnius, Lithuania hosted the exhibit. The exhibition presents thirty-one members of the Baltic community in Washington State through current portraits by Northwest photographer Mary Randlett, photographs from the participants' personal collections, and quotes about their lives. In the accompanying booklet, the participants tell their own stories about life in Washington State and how they have preserved their identity as Americans and as Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The exhibit was co-curated by Nicolette Bromberg, Visual Materials Curator in Special Collections, and Amanda Swain, doctoral candidate in the Department of History.
Correction: An Ellison Center News item in the Fall 2008 newsletter misidentified Ellen Karm's article, “Environment and Energy: The Baltic Sea Gas Pipeline,” published in the Journal of Baltic Studies, June 2008, as her Master's thesis. Although based on her thesis, the article is the result of Ellen's continued research and writing after graduating in 2006.
