Maya Watson is a first-year candidate for the Harriman Institute Master of Arts in Regional Studies-Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe. She received her BA in Russian and Eastern European Studies and History from Middlebury College in 2025 and studied at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan in the spring of 2024. She has spent time studying history and politics in the South Caucuses with the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia (2024) and working as an English teacher in Gagauzia, Moldova through the Fulbright program (2025-2026). Her undergraduate research focused on national identity and agricultural policy in Soviet Kazakhstan, and she has worked on issues of nuclear diplomacy in Eurasia with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies as a research assistant. She is the co-author of two bibliographical entries on missionaries in the Russian Empire for the University of Birmingham’s Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, and her writing on nuclear energy in Kazakhstan has been published with Inkstick Media. She is currently learning Turkish, and she plans to focus on the Black Sea region in her master’s thesis.