Associate Member

Russell Zanca (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999) first began traveling to and studying in the former Soviet Union more than 25 years ago, and to Central Asia more than 20 years ago. He spent his graduate school years outside of Urbana learning about Central Asia at Columbia U., the U. Wisconsin, and Indiana U. Over the years he has published mainly on Uzbekistan, covering topics such as collective farming, the cotton monoculture, cuisine, religion, gender, and Soviet history. He has co-edited Everyday Life in Central Asia with Jeff Sahadeo (2007, Indiana) and written Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village, Cotton Farming after Communism (2011, Wadsworth). Russell has long served on the Central Eurasian Studies Society board, and serves as an editor for the Journal of Eurasian Studies. In 2010 he began working with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin to help establish and enrich the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, and recently became an international coordinator of graduate anthropological studies at the Al-Faraby National University of Kazakhstan in Almaty. Russell serves as a professor at Northeastern Illinois University (1999) as well as an associate at both the University of Chicago’s Center for Eurasian, East European and Russian Studies (2009), and at the University of Illinois’ Russian, Eurasian, and East European Center(2002).

William Benton Whisenhunt is Professor Emeritus of History at College of DuPage.  He holds a Ph.D. in Russian/Soviet history from the  University of Illinois at Chicago.  He was a J. William Fulbright Senior Scholar at Ryazan' State University in Russia.  His current research is on Russian-American relations.  He is Co-Managing Editor of the Journal of Russian American Studies (JRAS). 

I am assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame, with a Ph.D. from the from University of California Berkeley. I am also concurrent faculty at the Keough School for Global Affairs. Before joining Notre Dame’s faculty, I was a post-doc at University of Chicago. During the 2018/2019 Academic Year I was a EURIAS Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies.

My projects have been supported through research funding from Notre Dame and various external funding sources, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Commission/Marie-Curie Actions, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

My book Post-Soviet Power: State-led Development and Russia’s Marketization (2015, Cambridge University Press) examines the political economy of newly created electricity markets in Russia, and more generally engages with questions how we study markets in the post-Soviet context and beyond. The book was awarded honorable mention in the 2016 Ed. Hewett Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in political economy, by the Association for Study of Eastern Europe, Eurasian and Slavic Studies (ASEEES). I conduct research and publish on other aspects of the post-Soviet transformations - on the effects of sanctions, on welfare reforms and the politics of expertise. My publications have appeared in Governance, Governance and Regulation, Economy and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Slavic Review, Europe-Asia Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, the Russian Analytical Digest and the Chicago Policy Review (see research page).

The empirical focus of my current project is agriculture and food production. I am working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Setting the Table, which examines the evolution of industrial food systems in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

Jelena Vujic (PhD), Full Professor, was born and raised in Belgrade where she graduated from the Faculty of Philology, Belgrade University. She has been employed at the Faculty of Philology since 1998. She defended her MA thesis Composition as a word-formation process in computer register in English. In 2003, she defended her doctoral dissertation Inflection as a word-formation process in English. In 2006, she became an Assistant Professor. In 2012, she was assigned Associate Professorship and in 2016. Currently, she teaches courses in Descriptive grammar of English I-IV. She is a well-published author who has participated and presented her papers at more than 40 of international conferences and congresses world-wide. Her scientific interests include word-formation patterns in English and Serbian, features of loanwords, aspects of inflection, sociolinguistic aspects of the language of the diasporas, gender-markedness issues, etc. She is the author of the following three books: Osnovi morfologije engleskog jezika (2006), Describing English through Theory and Practice I (2011), Describing English through Theory and Practice II (2012), Konstrukcione teme (2016). She has also supervised a number of PhD and master theses. Prof. Vujic is a member of the following professional associations: International Linguistic Association, North-American Association for Serbian Studies, Philologia, Serbian Society for Applied Linguistics and Serbian Society of Anglicists, and SEESA. In addition, she serves as a member of the editorial board of several language journals including ESP Today, Philologia and Belgrade BELLS among others. In October 2016, Prof. Vujic assumed the position of Head of the English Language and Literature Department.

Expertise

Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history; Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century; Europe 1871-1919; and graduate courses on the Russian Revolution and European Empires.

Courses Taught

Hist 111B: World History: The West, 1500 - Present

Hist 305: Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1871 - 1919

Hist 314A: Russian History from the Varangians to 1855

Hist 314B: Russian and Soviet History, 1855 - Present

Hist 308: Human Rights in History, Literature, and Law

Research Interests

Empire, nationality, and religion in late imperial Russia; Sugar and Power in Late Imperial Russia

Education

Coumbia University, History, Ph.D., 1999

Selected Publications

Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).

Dr. Tamara Sivertseva, a social anthropologist, is an expert on Islam’s role in shaping civil society through the Caucasus. She has conducted extensive field research in Dagestan and Azerbaijan.

Dr. Sivertseva is currently working on a book project that explores cultural and religious factors of family, everyday life, longevity, girls’ education, and identity issues in the Caucasus an Central Asia.

Subjects:

Azerbaijan, Islamic Movements

Ron is the founder and president of Serendipity-Russia. His wife, Susie, is a vice president of the organization, along with David Johnson -- and was the initial webmaster. Ron retired from the Politics and Government Department at Illinois State University in June 2009 -- after 33 years of teaching. He and Susie are in the process of sharing -- and ultimately turning over responsibility for the American Home project to the next generation.

Their goal is to foster the use of the American Home's resources to make a positive difference in Russian-American relations and in the transition of Russian society. They also very much value the positive contribution the American home experience provides to the teachers and other Americans involved with this project.

Professor Madhavan K. Palat is a Trustee of Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, and has most recently served as editor for several volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru published by Oxford University Press. From 1974 until he retirement in 2004 he was a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi focusing on modern Russian and European history. In 2006 he was a visiting Professor of Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago. He holds a D.Phil. from St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. 

Specialization – Imperial Russian History, 18th – 20th century
Other interests – Modern European Intellectual History

Appointments:
1974-2004 taught at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and took early retirement in 2004.
1992-1995, Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
2006 Spring quarter, Visiting Professor of Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago.
2010-2011, National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India.
2011– Editor, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi. 

I have been analyzing grammatical structures in the Slavic languages from the viewpoints of language typology, language contact (areal linguistics), and historical linguistics. I began my scholarly career as a specialist in Russian, particularly its syntax. During M.A., I began examining two South Slavic languages, BCMS and Slovene, in the context of contrastive linguistic analysis of Russian and South Slavic. Since working on my Ph.D. thesis, I have been interested in and intensively studying grammatical changes in minority Slavic languages, focusing particularly on Kashubian, which is spoken mainly in Pomeranian Voivodeship in the northern part of Poland. In addition, I am a sociolinguist and specialize in language policy, language planning, and linguistic landscape from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. I am specifically interested in the so-called Slavic literary microlanguages and until now, I have conducted numerous field studies on Kashubian and Podlachian (Poland), Burgenland Croatian (Austria), Banat Bulgarian (Serbia and Romania), Bunjevac (Serbia), West Polessian (Belarus and Ukraine), Gorani (Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania) and other areas. Furthermore, I have been an active organizer of various international conferences on Slavic linguistics which were held at SRC and other universities (2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2018).