Prokudin-Gorskii photo of the Emir of Bukhara, 1911, from the Library of Congress

Russian Studies Alumni

	Owen Kohl '02 received a Watson Fellowship for the 2002-03 year to study the role of hip-hop as social commentary and a voice for minorities in postcolonial societies, including France, Senegal, Russia, Croatia and Mongolia.
	Emilia Simeonova, class of 2002 (Targovishte, Bulgaria), is a graduate student in International Economics at Columbia University. She divides her time between a cozy apartment on the Upper West Side and visiting friends and family around the world.
	After spending the summer following graduation as a gardener on St. Paul's Summit Avenue, 2002 graduate Quinn Martin bought a plane ticket to Russia, where he has started a career as a freelance journalist. He is writing for The Moscow Times, a couple on-line magazines that deal with Central and Eastern Europe, and a few magazines here in the States. His particular areas of interest, pursued at Macalester and abroad, include international relations, human rights and the media. His work is regularly posted at Freelance Success.
	Joy Ziegeweid, class of '01 (Arcadia, WI), was a Russian, Central and East European Studies major and spent a semester in Moscow on the Boston University program, where she interned at the National Democratic Institute. After graduation, she worked as assistant arts editor for The Moscow Times. She has since returned stateside and is planning on graduate studies in urban planning.
	After having graduated in May, 1999, Jake Rudnitsky returned to Russia and works for the expatriate newspaper, eXile. See his work and more at the website.
	Elizabeth Eagen, class of 2000, is an associate in the Central Asian Division of Human Rights Watch -- a very fine organization that has much to do in the former Soviet Union. Her work has taken her to Moscow, the Caucasus republic and Central Asia.
	Kristin Hayden '92 was a triple major in Russian, international studies, and Soviet and East European studies. She lived in the Russian House, assisted refugee children from the former Soviet Union at a St. Paul elementary school, and spent a semester studying in Moscow as the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. After graduation, her internship at the Foundation for Russian-American Cooperation in Seattle led to another internship at the newly opened Russian consulate in Seattle. That experience in turn helped her gain a job with a Seattle company, which then sent her to Moscow to develop and manage its Russian pharmaceutical business. She has since gone on to found OneWorld Now!, a two year global leadership program for high school youth. "This was an amazing opportunity for a recent grad with no business or medical background. … Thank you, Macalester," wrote Hayden via email from London.
	Rebecca Hanson '95, who majored in history and Russian area studies, said her Russian courses at Mac were "fabulous. I'm getting my master's degree [in Russian, Central and East European Studies] at Georgetown right now and I have to say Mac prepared me extremely well." Hanson says it was probably the language preparation she had at Mac as well as her experience of studying in St. Petersburg that helped her land a job as an analyst with the CIA. Rebecca eventually moved over the White House, and staffed the Afghanistan desk for the National Security Council. Since then she has left government service, and is presently a law student at the University of Chicago.
Lewis Thompson, a fellow Russian major of Kohl and Martin, has returned to Russia after participating in the ACM study abroad semester and graduating with a double major in RCEES and economics. He is currently pursuing a masters in economics at Saint Petersburg State University. Heidi Lowrey '95 (Honolulu, HI) continued working after graduation at a Moscow AIDS clinic where she had done an undergraduate internship. She has since finished medical school and works as a resident physician in Anchorage, AK. Another graduate, Jed Sunden '92 (New York, NY), traveled to Kiev, Ukraine for a post-graduate tour and has been the publisher of the Kyiv Post. Jenny Abel '93 spent a year in Siberia in the region of Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest lake, working for the U.S.-based Rural Enterprise Adaptation Program on sustainable farming; then spent two and a half years managing agricultural development projects in Russia and Senegal at Rodale Institute, a sustainable agriculture research and education organization in Pennsylvania. She has since earned a masters degree in food science from Penn State. Laura McCallister '94 (Roanoke, VA), wrote a senior thesis on health in St. Petersburg, and went on to do graduate work in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She went to do work on public health issues in Russia. David Brandenberger '92 (Appleton, WI) worked as a curricular consultant at Moscow State Linguistic University for a year; then entered Ph.D. program in Soviet history at Harvard; spent 1996-97 academic year ferreting through former Communist Party archives in Moscow; worked in Stalin's personal library and with Red Army files produced by the NKVD. Since receiving his Ph.D., he taught in the history departments of both Harvard and Yale, and is presently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Richmond. He is the author of National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity (2002), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (2006), and two forthcoming books, Political Humor under Stalin: an Anthology of Unofficial Jokes and Anecdotes, and Propaganda State: Stalinist Ideology, Terror and Political Indoctrination. Ingrid Summers '91 (Bellingham, WA) received a full, five-year fellowship to study anthropology at Columbia University, and recently received an IREX fellowship for a year of dissertation research in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Laura Adams '90 (Minneapolis, MN) received her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, during which she spent 10 months in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Her research involves national holidays in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: how they express new and old identities, and how the Soviet experience fundamentally shaped the way Uzbekistan's cultural elites understand Uzbek national identity and culture. She was a guest speaker at the 2004 Central Asia Symposium at Macalester.