Student Spotlight

Sarah Calderone (SIPA ’18) has been interested in the treatment of migrants in Russia since 2012. That year, as a junior at Drew University, she received a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. State Department to study Russian in Vladimir—a small city about 120 miles outside of Moscow. Calderone spent two months there, and was struck by the negative attitude toward migrants that she encountered. Read more.

When Maria Snegovaya, a doctoral candidate in Columbia’s Department of Political Science, started researching the rise of the radical and populist right in Eastern and Central Europe back in 2013, she had no idea just how globally relevant the topic would become. Then, three years later, radical and populist right movements gained unexpected prominence in both Western Europe and the United States. Read more.

In late September 2016, Joss Meakins (MARS-REERS ’17), a University Consortium (UC) Fellow, traveled to Moscow’s Higher School of Economics for UC’s annual two-day conference about Euro-Atlantic relations in the post-Cold-War era and beyond. The UC, which launched last year thanks to a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is a partnership between six leading institutions in North America, Europe, and Russia, that promotes training, research, engagement and policy outreach on Euro-Atlantic issues critical to addressing the crisis in Russia-West relations. Read more.