Emily D. Johnson, Co-Director, is the Brian and Sandra O’Brien Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (Penn State University Press, 2006), the editor and translator of Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters (Yale University Press, 2017), and, along with Julie Buckler, coeditor of Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern 2013). Most recently she co-edited, along with Alan Barenberg, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, 2022). Johnson also regularly publishes articles on contemporary Russian culture. Her interests include Putinist rhetoric and imagery, Eurovision and East European politics, Russian-language rap music, Russian romance novels, and post-Soviet celebrity culture.
Melissa K. Stockdale, Co-Director, is the Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor in History. Her regional specialty is the territory of the former Russian Empire, with research interests in the First World War and Russian Revolution, nationalism, gender, and memory. Her most recent publications include Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the edited volume Readings on the Russian Revolution: Debates, Aspirations, Outcomes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), and, with Adele Lindenmyer, the edited volume Women and Gender in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922 (Slavica, 2022.) Her current book project is Monumentally Divided, a transnational history of contested and toppled monuments.
Hannah S. Chapman is the Theodore Romanoff Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies. Previously, she was a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her research, teaching, and service are in the fields of comparative political behavior with a substantive focus on public opinion, political participation, and political communication in non-democracies and a regional focus on Russian and post-Soviet politics. Her current book project, Dialogue with the Dictator: Information Manipulation and Authoritarian Legitimation in Putin's Russia, examines the role of quasi-democratic participation mechanisms in reinforcing authoritarian regimes. Other publications include “Shoring Up Autocracy: Participatory Technologies and Regime Support in Putin's Russia," Comparative Political Studies (2021) and “Xenophobia on the Rise? Temporal and Regional Trends in Xenophobic Attitudes in Russia,” with Kyle L. Marquardt, Yoshiko M. Herrera, and Theodore P. Gerber, Comparative Politics, v. 50.
Dustin Condren is an assistant professor of Russian literature and language in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Condren’s research centers on the literature and visual cultures of the early Soviet period, and the physical forms (cinema, photography, graphic art, architecture) that frame them. The book he is currently completing analyzes Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s articulated but unrealized film projects of the 1920s and 30s. Concerned with questions of the unfinished, of failure, and of the infinite, the monograph recovers some important pieces of forgotten cinema while investigating certain political realities and practical contingencies of the filmmaking process in early Stalinist Russia. Condren is also an active translator of Russian.
Rebecca Cruise, associate professor in International and Area Studies, is Associate Dean of Student Services in the College of International and Area Studies. She specializes in security studies and comparative politics, with a focus on issues of security community development, international organizations, post-conflict resolution, political participation and gender. Though she takes an international perspective in much of her work, her regional focus tends toward Southeastern and Central Europe. She has published articles in International Politics, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and the Croatian International Relations Review. Her current book project is Eastern Efficacy: Female Political Participation in Post-Communist Europe.
Rob Andrew is an Adjunct Instructor at the College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He retired in 2019 from the U.S. Government after more than 30 years of service as a U.S. diplomat and Army Officer. He joined the Foreign Service in 2002 and his international assignments included tours in Mexico, Russia, Costa Rica and Sweden His last assignment in the State Department was in Miami, FL as the Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Marine Corps Forces, South. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Rob served as a U.S. Army officer from 1989 to 2002. Among several stateside and overseas assignments, he fought in the First Gulf War (Desert Shield/Desert Storm) in 1991 in Iraq and Kuwait with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, earning the Army Commendation Medal with “V” for valor device. Rob has a B.A. in Political Science from California State University, Chico and an M.A. in National Security Affairs from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
Professor Boris Apanasov received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and joined OU in 1991 as a full professor of Mathematics. His specialty is Geometry/Topology, especially Discrete Groups and Dynamics of Discrete Group Action in symmetric spaces of rank 1 and deformations of geometric structures on manifolds. He has about 150 publications, including 12 books. Additionally, Professor Apanasov is affiliate professor in CIS and has retained strong professional ties with colleagues in the Russian Federation, frequently giving invited talks there, and publishing, including scripts for Yuri Shiller’s films and articles in “Higher Education Today” and “Science First Hand” magazines. He has a strong interest in contemporary Russian culture and has been an active supporter of Russian Studies at OU.
Elena Carmichael received her M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) from Northern Illinois University and Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics with a minor in Second Language Studies from Indiana University. Dr. Carmichael’s research interests include second language pedagogy, written corrective feedback in L2 Russian, teaching with technology, and teaching Russian phonetics. She is interested in developing materials for reading, listening, and practicing Russian grammar.
Dace Demir received her Ph.D. in Cultural Policy Studies from the University of Warwick (UK), M.A. in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), and her B.A. in Intercultural Relations from the Latvian Academy of Culture (Latvia).
Her commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship is reflected in her current work as she teaches across three colleges at the University of Oklahoma: International Studies, Fine Arts, and Professional and Continuing Studies. Her research interests include comparative cultural policy and institutional development of contemporary visual arts. In terms of regional specialization, she focuses on transition economies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries from a comparative perspective.
Her most recent research applies social network analysis (SNA) to explore the emergence, development and maturation of Latvian contemporary visual arts as a distinct institutional field during and after the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s.
Nathan Marks earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2022 and joined MLLL as a lecturer of Russian in 2023. He is interested in Slavic linguistics, dialectology, phonetics, and phonology, with a particular focus on the relationship between “Standard Language” and dialects as well as the effect of standardization and language ideologies on attitudes toward dialects. He is also interested in current developments in Slavic languages, including Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and BCMS (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin). His research brings together phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, and dialectology rooted in a strong commitment to fieldwork. His long-term goal is to add to what he sees as a paucity of scholarly works in the areas of perceptual dialectology, languages attitudes, acoustic phonetics, and experimental phonology within Slavic languages.
Kayhan A. Nejad is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Nejad earned his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2021. Before joining OU, he served as a Nizami Ganjavi Centre Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, and as a Senior Researcher with the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Nejad’s research centers on the linkages between the greater Middle East and former Soviet Union, a space connecting Iran with Russia, the North and South Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Turkey. His book manuscript, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Imperial Borderlands, rethinks the breakdown in ties between Iranian revolutionaries and their foreign supporters to proffer a new explanation for the re-establishment of monarchy in Iran in 1921. At OU, Nejad teaches on modern Iranian history, modern European history, contemporary and historical Iran-U.S. relations, and the global history of communism.
Dr. Darren Purcell grew up during the 1980s and Cold War, becoming fascinated with the then Soviet Union and the media images of it. As a geography student he took courses across history, political science and geography that strengthened his knowledge of Russia, the then Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Since arriving at the University of Oklahoma in 2005, he has taught a range of courses in geography, including a Geography of Europe course which incorporated Russia into the content. Currently he is working on projects related to the framing of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in American late-night humor as well as the memes being created by Ukraine to portray Russia's actions.
Jay Shorten received a BA in Russian (Hons.) from the University of Waterloo in 1992 and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario in 1994. He is a faculty librarian at the University of Oklahoma and the cataloguer of the Romanoff Collection. He is presently improving the description of some of the Russian-language publications held by OU’s libraries, including works on geology, so that the collection is more accessible to researchers both on and off campus. He enjoys collecting Russian-language textbooks and other Russian publications.
Katerina Tsetsura is Gaylord Family Professor of Public Relations and Strategic Communication and associate professor at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her research areas include global public relations development, ethics, media transparency, social construction of public relations, women in the field of strategic communication, public diplomacy and government relations, and understanding and countering disinformation. She is a co-author of Transparency, Public Relations, and the Mass Media: Combating Hidden Influences in News Coverage Worldwide (2017, Taylor & Francis) and co-editor of Strategic Communications in Russia: Public Relations and Advertising (2021, Taylor & Francis).
Currently, Dr. Tsetsura serves as a PI on the OU DISC seed grant to study community resilience to disinformation and as a co-PI on the multi-disciplinary OU-funded Big Idea Challenge project “CHEPS: Carbon-free Hydrogen Energy Production and Storage.”
Dr. Sabina Amanbayeva is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oklahoma City University, where she teaches courses in Russian language, World literature, Shakespeare, and early British literature. Her research focuses on Soviet children’s literature, Russian translations of Shakespeare, and Soviet-Western cross-cultural relations more generally. Her most recent articles are “Abai Kunanbaiuly and Russian Culture: Changing Paradigms in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” forthcoming in Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context (Open Book Publishers, winter 2022) and an article in Russian, “The Soviet cartoon Kroshka Enot (1974) and the American children’s story ‘Little Raccoon and the Thing in the Pool’ (1963),” published in Detskie Chtenia, a Russian academic journal dedicated to children’s literature. She received her PhD in English from the University of Delaware, and she is excited to be working in Central Asian Studies more recently.
Stephen P. Friot is a Senior District Judge in the Federal District Court in Oklahoma City. He has lectured at numerous law schools in major cities in Russia and has conducted seminars in Russia for judges of Russian regional courts as well as the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the Academy of Justice of the Russian Federation. He has hosted seven delegations of Russian judges, lawyers and academics in the United States under the auspices of the Open World program and is the author of three articles published in the Comparative Constitutional Review (Moscow). He is also the author of Containing History-How Cold War History Explains U.S.-Russia Relations, to be released by the University of Oklahoma Press in June, 2023.
Educated at Williams College, Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, and NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, Professor Koshkin-Youritzin was a Ford Foundation Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and taught at Vanderbilt and Tulane before joining the OU faculty in 1972. He retired in 2016 as David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Art History. An internationally known scholar and Book-of-the-Month Club author, Youritzin has authored a number of Russian-related exhibition catalogues for shows he curated, including: Five Contemporary Russian Artists (Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art, 1992), Twentieth-Century Russian Art (Oklahoma State University Gardiner Art Gallery, 1994), and Twentieth-Century Russian Drawings from a Private Collection (Arkansas Art Center, 1997). For a 2002 show he organized for OU's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Youritzin published the award-winning Pavel Tchelitchew, featuring artwork by the famed Russian-American painter and ballet set designer (a distant relative of his). Since 1992 Youritzin has served as Vice President of the national Koussevitzky Recordings Society.
Jonathan Z. Ludwig is Teaching Associate Professor of Russian at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. He received his BA in Russian/Soviet Studies from Sewanee: The University of the South and his MA and PhD in Slavic Linguistics from Indiana University, Bloomington. At OSU he teaches all levels of Russian, as well as courses on Russian culture in English. His newest course is on Russian Spies in Fact and Fiction. His research interests include Russia, Central Asia, and foreign language education policy. He has written and published on Russian history, literature, politics, and language pedagogy. His book A Concise History of Central Asia is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Mara Sukholutskaya is Director of the Russian Program and the Global Education Office at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. Dr. Sukholutskaya is a founder and President of the Central Association of Russian Teachers of America (CARTA). Her research interests include Russian language Pedagogy and Russian Culture. Dr. Sukholutskaya holds an Honorary Doctorate in Linguistics and International Communications from National M. Dragomanov Pedagogical University, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Born and raised in Kazakhstan, I moved to Russia in 1996 to receive my B.A. and M.A. majoring in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies at Moscow State Lomonosov University. In 2002, I was admitted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of Modern Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, I defended my dissertation and eventually managed to publish it – Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians (1856-1914) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). My new book project focuses on extreme nationalist movements in Eastern Europe – its working title is “Unorthodox Fascism: the Evolution of the Far-Right in Russia, Bulgaria, and Greece (1905-1939).” Since 2008, I have been teaching at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
