2017 Fisher Fellow: Ingrid Nordgaard

Ingrid Nordgaard, PhD Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, was awarded the 2017 Fisher Fellowship for her research at the Summer Research Lab on aesthetics in Russia’s north. The fellowship, named after Dr. Ralph Fisher, the founder of SRL and REEEC, and a champion for building the Slavic collection at the University of Illinois Library, provides funding to a scholar with a particularly promising research project.

While at SRL, Nordgaard worked on the first chapter of her dissertation project, “Aesthetics of the North: Russian Modernist Culture and Scandinavia, 1891-1910.” She also gave a Noontime Scholars Lecture entitled “On the Frozen Sea: Exploring, Writing and Painting the Northern Frontier.”

According to Nordgaard, SRL has been on her radar for a while. After reading about it on SEELANGS, she was encouraged by professors to apply and heard excellent reports from fellow graduate students, who had attended SRL in the past. After defending her prospectus last spring, she decided to kick-start her dissertation, or, as she calls it “the big forest that is The Dissertation” by attending SRL, knowing that she would be able to work with the staff at Slavic Reference Service, who would be able to give tips on how to tackle such a big project.

At the early stages of her research, Nordgaard has found SRL most helpful for getting advice on how to collect materials most efficiently, that is, locate archives, track down obscure sources and access them in the US. In general, she is searching for resources that shed light on how cultural producers in Russia approached the North within the period she is studying. Since she has been at SRL, she has been able to locate articles on the topic from several Russian journals published in the 1890s, and she has also made a list of what archives and folders to look into when she goes to Russia. Additionally, she remarked that the Slavic Reference Service librarians have been an excellent resource on their own.  “You might find several copies of a book, but there’s only one Joe Lenkart!” said Norgaard.

Her favorite thing about the SRL experience has been allowing herself to completely indulge in her work without thinking of anything else. “Waking up in the morning,” she said, “I’m excited to start another day of research — every day brings something new, since you can never really be completely certain about what you might find!”

“I would highly recommend SRL! Even though I attend a large research institution like Yale University and have access to a wide array of resources, it still does not compare to attending a lab in which you get to work so closely with a librarian and receive personal advice on how to approach various research questions,” said Nordgaard. Plus, she remarked, the people in Urbana-Champaign are very friendly, the squirrels and the rabbits are amazingly bold, and the campus area has a lovely atmosphere.

2016 Fisher Fellow: Anastasiya Boika

2016 Fisher Fellow Anastasiya Boika

The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center awarded the competitive Fisher Fellowship, now in its fourth year, to a 2016 Summer Research Lab (SRL) participant. The fellowship, named after Dr. Ralph Fisher, the founder of SRL and REEEC, and a champion for building the Slavic collection at the University of Illinois Library, provides full domestic travel support, a housing grant, and an honorarium to a scholar with a particularly promising research project. This year’s Fisher Fellow was Anastasiya Boika, Ph.D. Candidate in History at Queen’s University in Canada. While at SRL, she worked on her research project “Greening St. Petersburg: Curing the ailments of city living in late Imperial Russia” and gave a Noontime Scholars lecture entitled “Curing the Ailments of City Living: The Garden City in Late Imperial Russia.”

Boika initially learned about SRL as a first-year PhD student and applied for SRL just as she was leaving for a six-week research trip to Minsk and St. Petersburg. Upon return from the archives in Russia and Belarus, she came to SRL in order to investigate any resources she had missed while in Russia and Belarus as well as to work with the Slavic Reference Service librarians to access additional source material.

Boika’s research at SRL was primarily geared toward obtaining further primary sources for her dissertation. Some of the works she found might also appear in an article, but the main goal was to gain access to some of the periodicals that were not available at her home institution. During her time at SRL, she was able to access a large portion of the publication Zodchii and a few books, including V. Dadonov’s Sotsializm bez politiki and Fedotov’s Illustriovanni’ putevoditel’ po dachnim, vodolechebnim i zhivopisnim mestnostiam Finlandii. She was very grateful for the opportunity to access an array of primary source materials as well as for the chance to give a lecture, meet other researchers, and “work with the amazing staff that make the Summer Research Lab possible.”

Stephanie Chung is a Ph.D. Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in Soviet literature and culture, Russian women’s writing, and Czech literature. She received her B.A. in Plan II Honors/Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2007; and her M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing a dissertation on Soviet women’s memoirs as literary and media texts.

2015 Fisher Fellow Sean McDaniel

The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center awarded the competitive Fisher Fellowship, now in its third year, to a participant of the Summer Research Lab (SRL). The fellowship, named after Dr. Ralph Fisher, the founder of SRL and REEEC, and a champion for building the Slavic collection at the University of Illinois Library, provides full domestic travel support, a housing grant, and an honorarium to a scholar with a particularly promising research project.  This year’s Fisher Fellow was Sean McDaniel, a PhD candidate in History at Michigan State University.

Sean McDaniel thanks Ralph Fisher. #ThanksRalph

McDaniel’s broader topics of research include migration within the Russian political space, the formation of ground-level power dynamics resulting from those movements, and the extent to which imperial policies and practices informed those of the Soviet state. This summer, McDaniel is focusing specifically on the role of horses at the intersection of state, settler, and indigenous power in the Kazakh Steppe during the late imperial and early Soviet periods. At SRL, he is interested in finding material on late imperial horse breeding, mostly from government data and directives.

McDaniel learned about SRL through his advisors at Michigan State, who encouraged him to apply and take advantage of the Slavic Reference Service and collection at the University of Illinois. He has been pleasantly surprised and somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of resources he has found available to him here. He is most impressed with the Slavic Reference librarians who have been helping him collect materials on his topic. McDaniel says he has never taken advantage of the resources offered by librarians before his trip to SRL and will now go back to the library at his home institution to see what they have to offer.

The application for the 2016 Fisher Fellowship will open in January 2016. Doctoral candidates at the dissertation stage of their research and post-doctoral scholars in any discipline with a focus on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia are encouraged to apply.

Samantha Celmer is a graduate student in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on incidents of genocide, crimes against humanity, and sexual violence in Russia and Eastern Europe. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College in History and Russian and Eastern European Studies in December 2013. After graduation, she hopes to work with organizations that focus on international human rights.

2014 Fisher Fellow – Pey-Yi Chu

The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center awarded the competitive Fisher Fellowship, now in its second year, to a participant of the Summer Research Lab (SRL). The fellowship, named after Dr. Ralph Fisher, the founder of SRL and REEEC, and a champion for building the Slavic collection at the University of Illinois Library, provides full domestic travel support, a housing grant, and an honorarium to a scholar with a particularly promising research project.  This year’s Fisher Fellow was Pey-Yi Chu, Assistant Professor of History at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

2014 Fisher Fellow Pey-Yi Chu in the International and Area Studies Library

While at SRL, Prof. Chu will work on research and writing for her book manuscript Permafrost Country: Science and Environment in Eastern Siberia, 1830s-1950s, which is about the history of frozen earth research and its connections to economic development in eastern Siberia. She will use the University of Illinois’ vast Slavic collections and the help of the Slavic Reference Service staff to “fill those gaps” in her knowledge and in the source base for her project. Additionally, Prof. Chu will concentrate on developing a more systematic and comprehensive picture of economic practices and environmental change in the Lena River valley before 1917. She will also track down published material (older books, scientific articles, conference reports) about frozen earth research and permafrost science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After SRL, Prof. Chu will begin synthesizing the material and move forward with writing one of her book’s chapters, as well as finishing an article on mapping permafrost.

Prof. Chu learned about SRL a few years ago and had it in the back of her mind as a program she wanted to take advantage of at some point. More recently, she spoke with a colleague who had previously participated in SRL. He praised the reference services, library resources, and peaceful atmosphere in Champaign-Urbana, which encouraged her to apply. Since Pomona College does not have a large research library, she was looking for a place over the summer that could be a “one-stop shop” in terms of the scale of its Slavic collection and the availability of library experts who can help her obtain sources.  SRL has turned out to be “exactly” what she was looking for. Moreover, she was “surprised, delighted, and honored” to receive the Fisher Fellowship.

The application for the 2015 Fisher Fellowship will open in January 2015. Doctoral candidates at the dissertation stage of their research and post-doctoral scholars in any discipline with a focus on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia are encouraged to apply.

Stephanie Chung is a Ph.D. Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in Soviet literature and culture, Russian women’s writing, and Czech literature. She received her B.A. in Plan II Honors, and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2007; and her M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2009 at the University of Texas at Austin. She plans to write a dissertation on Soviet women’s memoirs focused on the writer and translator Lilianna Lungina.

2013 Fisher Fellow Yuliya Uryadova

The Fisher Fellowship provides financial support, including roundtrip transportation, housing, and a research stipend, to one scholar participating in the Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois during the month of June.  It is presented in honor of Dr. Ralph Fisher, the founder of the Summer Research Laboratory and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois, and the original champion behind the extensive Slavic collection at the International and Area Studies library.

At the Slavic Reference Service: Dr. Uryadova with Dr. Dmitry Tartakovsky, Visiting South Slavic Specialist

This year’s Fisher Fellow, Dr. Yulia Uryadova (University of Arkansas) was chosen from a competitive batch of applicants.  The project she researched while at SRL examines the political, economic and social stresses of incorporating the Ferghana Valley into the Russian Empire in the late-19^th century.  In particular, she assesses the tensions between the Russian and Central Asian populations, state and local authorities, land and tax issues, economic dislocation, prostitution, and alcoholism.  Dr. Uryadova argues that in the Late Imperial Era, the Ferghana Valley was a restive place, burdened by economic and social tensions that resulted in a growth of crime, including revolutionary terrorism and banditry.  This rise in crime coincided with a growth in immigration to the region.   Her work sheds light on the threat to imperial authority in Russian Turkestan.

Dr. Uryadova’s project incorporates materials that Western historians did not previously have access to and that Soviet historians largely ignored because of their focus on ideological arguments.  The use of these previously inaccessible sources allows Dr. Uryadova to challenge the traditional understanding of empires and their fringes, and defies the existing historiography and narrative of Central Asia by examining the Ferghana Valley as a social, economic, and ideological crossroads.

Dr. Uryadova was attracted to the Summer Research Laboratory precisely because of the materials available in the International and Area Studies library, especially the famous 594-volume Turkestanskii Sbornik.  The copy of this document held in the reference collection is the only one currently available outside of Uzbekistan.  While visiting the University of Illinois, Dr. Uryadova also accessed the complete digitized national bibliography of Uzbekistan.

After completing her current project, Dr. Uryadova hopes to transform her work into a book manuscript.  She also plans to translate her expertise into the classroom setting by developing courses on Islamic societies beyond the Arabic-speaking world and on Russian history in a broader perspective.   In fact, Dr. Uryadova has already enriched her teaching activities by designing a seminar on comparative revolutions and by structuring the her courses around the themes of empire, cross-cultural exchange, colonial experience and revolutionary politics.

Support for the Fisher Fellowship is provided in part by the Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Office of Outreach Title VIII Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Independent States of the Former Soviet Union).  The application for the 2014 Fisher Fellowship will be open in January 2014.  PhD candidates at the dissertation stage of their research and post-doctoral scholars in any discipline with a focus on Russia or Eurasia are encouraged to apply.

Nellie Manis finished her MA at REEEC with a graduate minor in European Union Studies in May 2013. She received a BA in History and a BA in International Studies from Penn State University in 2008.  In August she will begin a Fulbright Student grant at the Linguistics University of Nizhnii Novgorod in Russia.  In addition to coursework in translation and interpretation, she will research the differences between translation pedagogy in the United States and Russia.