Student Spotlight

Bradley Gorski, a doctoral candidate in Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages, has devoted the majority of his time at Columbia to the study of Russian literature in the wake of Soviet collapse in order to understand how culture responds to institutional upheaval. Post-Soviet literature, says Gorski, formed as a set of reactions to perceived inadequacies in the literary system. Read more.

In January 2014, Diego Benning Wang (MARS-REERS, ’16), then an undergraduate student at New York University (NYU), traveled on a tourist visa to the North Caucasus, a politically unstable mountainous region in the southwestern corner of the Russian Federation. He was returning to the area for the second time in six months in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the land and its cultures in the wake of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing—the attack was executed by ethnically Chechen émigrés with ties to Dagestan. Read more.

Andrew Dolinar (GSAS, HR ‘16) was a sophomore studying sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, when he received a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State to study Russian in Kazan. It was summer 2012, and Russia’s second largest and most cosmopolitan city, St. Petersburg, had recently passed a law banning the “propaganda” of LGBT relations to minors. “Being a queer American in Russia while all this was happening was fascinating,” says Dolinar. While in Kazan, he made an effort to meet people in the queer community. Read more.

On February 22, 2014, Joseph Maberry (SIPA, MIA ‘16), a Peace Corps volunteer, sat in his apartment in Staryi Krym, a small historic town in Crimea, watching a livestream of the protests taking place on Maidan in the wake of the “Heavenly Hundred” massacre. Suddenly he received an email informing him that his Peace Corps service, which was supposed to last another month, would end that day. Read more.

Andrew Lohsen (SIPA ’15) became interested in corruption while living in St. Petersburg on a Flagship Language Fellowship (2007-8), where he frequently encountered low-level officials seeking bribes. While working on security and nuclear nonproliferation issues at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism (2010-13), he became convinced that systemic corruption was a critical problem for Eurasian states. The desire to take more direct action against corruption prompted him to enroll in Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in 2013. Read more.