Alumni

For over 60 years, the University of Michigan has been training Russian, East European, and Eurasian specialists. Many alumni from CREES and other degree programs have gone on to have distinguished careers in a variety of fields. Alumni are invited to share news on your activities since graduation.

Please fill out this short form at any time with any academic or career news, as well as changes to your contact information. You are also welcome to email us at crees@umich.edu with any updates. Please let us know if we may post this news on our website and if we may share your contact information with current students or recent alumni interested in pursuing an internship or career in your field.

Ryan Aiken (MA REES ’09) is a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, Hungary. (7/3/19)

Louis Albertini (MA REES ’13) is the Head of Product Marketing at Glide (San Francisco). (10/4/2024)

Alena Aniskiewicz (PhD Slavic ‘19) is an assistant professor at the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities at Michigan State University. (6/6/2025)

Eugene M. Avrutin (MA History MA ’98, PhD History ’04) released the book The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town (Oxford UP, 2017). (8/16/18)

Anne Bobroff-Hajal (PhD History ’82) exhibited Peasants, Clans, and Effervescent Absolutists! at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in September-October, 2018. (7/3/19)

Laurence Bogoslaw (PhD Slavic ’95), released the book Russians on Trump (East View Press, 2018). (8/16/18)

George W. Breslauer (PhD Political Science ‘73, BA Political Science ‘66) published a book review, “‘Did it Have to Come to This?’ Three Images of Vladimir Putin’s Attitudes toward Ukraine,” in Post-Soviet Affairs. (6/6/2025)

Thomas L. Brewer (PhD Business Administration ‘82) published Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Textbook (Springer 2024). (6/6/2025)

Susan Bronson (PhD History ‘95) became the President of the Yiddish Book Center. (6/6/2025)

Cynthia Buckley (BA Economics '85, MA REES '87, PhD Sociology '91) retired as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is currently an Adjunct Research Professor (PSC/ISR) at U-M. In Fall 2024, Buckley and colleagues were awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant, "Ethical and Responsible Social Science Research in Armed Conflict Contexts." (6/6/2025)

Steven R. Coe (MA REES ’86, PhD History ’93) works for the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. (7/3/19)

Robert Cutler (PhD Political Science ’82) is Senior Research Fellow for Energy Security at the NATO Association of Canada. (7/3/19)

Mark Augustine Dovich (BA REES/Political Science ’18, MA REES ’19) is volunteering in Yerevan with the Armenian Volunteer Corps program. (7/3/19)

Daina Stukuls Eglitis (MA REES ’93, PhD Sociology ’98) is president-elect of the academic organization, Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS). (10/4/2024)

Karen J. Evans-Romaine (PhD Slavic ’96) was the President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) from 2023-2024 (2-year term). (10/4/2024)

Anne O. Fisher (PhD Slavic ‘05) became co-editor (with Derek Mong) and translation editor of the literary journal At Length. She also translated Kateryna Sylvanova and Elena Malisova’s Leto v pionerskom galstuke (2021) as Pioneer Summer (Abrams 2025). (6/6/2025)

Ina Ganguli (MPP Public Policy/Graduate Certificate REES ’04) received the 2018 Russian National Prize in Applied Economics. (7/3/19)

Sarah Garibova (PhD History ’17) is an assistant teaching professor in the Jewish Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University. (8/16/18)

Robert F. Goeckel (BA Political Science ’73, MPP Public Policy ’74) published Soviet Religious Policy in Estonia and Latvia: Playing Harmony in the Singing Revolution (Indiana UP, 2018). (7/3/19)

Kathryn Graber (MA REES ’08, PhD Anthropology ’12) received the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from Indiana University Bloomington, 2020; and published Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell, co-ed. w/ E. Falconi (Brill, 2019). She also published Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell UP, 2020). (8/20/20)

Emanuela Grama (PhD Anthropology ’01) published Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (Indiana UP, 2019). (8/20/20)

Brian K. Grodsky (MA Political Science ’02, PhD Political Science ’06) is professor and associate chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (8/16/18)

Ksenya Gurshtein (PhD History of Art ’11) is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University. (7/3/19)

Ana Gabriela Guzman (MA REES ’17) is senior compliance analyst at Goldman Sachs. (7/3/19)

Erika Haber (PhD Slavic ’93) is professor of Russian language, literature, and culture at Syracuse University. (7/3/19)

Stephanie Hitztaler (MA REES/Natural Resources & Environment ’03, PhD Natural Resources & Environment ’10) is a postdoctoral Scholar at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. (8/16/18)

Alexandra Jason (MA REES ’16) is a program associate for the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. (7/3/19)

Deborah Jones (MA REES ’09, PhD Anthropology ’17) is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. (8/16/18)

Edward H. Judge (PhD History ’75) retired from Le Moyne College where he taught history from 1978-2018. Since retiring, he has worked part-time as a lecturer and resident historian on Viking Ocean Cruises. (8/20/20)

Jamal Khan (MA REES ’19) is the South Asia Country Director, Strategic Planning and Policy Directorate, Headquarters United States Indo Pacific Command, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii. (8/20/20)

Katherine Klaric (BA REES ‘13) is the Europe Policy Director at the U.S. International Finance Corporation. (6/6/2025)

Edith S. Klein (BA REES ‘71) retired as the Graduate Program Advisor at the University of Toronto's Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and has been working as an academic editor with clients in the social sciences and humanities. (6/6/2025)

Diane Koenker (PhD History ’76) retired from University College London and ended her term as Director of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 2023. She is now professor emeritus at UCL and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (10/4/2024)

David J. Kostelancik (MA REES ‘88) was appointed Deputy Coordinator in the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism in August 2024. (6/6/2025)

Jonathan Larson (PhD Anthropology ’07) is associate director of the European Union Center at the University Illinois, one of three centers in the country to hold both Title VI NRC and Jean Monnet Center of Excellence multi-year grants. (8/20/20)

Erica Lehrer (PhD Anthropology ’04) was awarded the Beethoven Classic 3 Research Grant, co-sponsored by the Polish National Science Center and German National Research Foundation, for the project “Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context.” (8/20/20)

Chandra Luczak (BA REES ’00) is deputy director for Southern California at UNICEF USA. (7/3/19)

Mike MacQueen (BA Economics ’80, MA REES ’83) retired from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center in January 2018. (8/16/18)

Oana Mateescu (PhD Anthropology/History ’18) is assistant professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. (7/3/19)

Mark Matossian (BA REES '87), Founder, Efficient Frontier | SPACE, flew a test payload to the Moon in 2025. (6/6/2025)

Andy McIntyre (BA REES ’14, MA REES ’15) is a regulatory analyst at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, & Hamilton, LLP in New York. (8/16/18)

Kelly McMann (PhD Political Science ‘00) was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame during the 2024-2025 academic year. (6/6/2025)

Kathryn Orwig (BA Creative Writing ’17) received a Hopwood Award for Nonfiction in August 2017 and had five short stories and two poems published in Confined Connections: An Anthology of Poems, Essays and Short Stories (Z Publishing House, 2017). (8/16/18)

Colleen O’Shea (BA REES ’07) is starting a new job as Associate Conservator of Antiquities at the Getty Villa in September 2024. (10/4/2024)

Jerry G. Pankhurst (PhD Sociology ‘78) published several articles in 2024-2025 with Alar Kilp on religious dimensions of Russia’s War in Ukraine. (6/6/2025)

Raymond Patton (PhD History ’11, MA Russian and East European Studies ’05) published In-Between Empire: Imperial Exceptionalism, Poland, and Colonial Travel Writing (Bloomsbury 2024). (6/6/2025)

María Pérez (BA REES/Economics ’97, PhD Anthropology ’12) is assistant professor of geography at West Virginia University. (8/20/20)

Lara Peterson (MA REES/MS Natural Resources Management ’04) is assistant director for Russia, Europe and Eurasia, International Programs, U.S. Forest Service. (8/20/20)

Jonathan Poser (MA REES/MPP Public Policy ’19) is resident director for the American Councils Russian-language Critical Language Scholarship Program in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. (7/3/19)

William C. Potter (PhD Political Science ’76) was appointed a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the UN Institute of Disarmament Research. (10/4/2024)

Eoin Power (MA REES ‘15) completed a PhD in political science at the University of Texas-Austin in May 2025, with a dissertation on defense-industrial policy in Poland and Romania. In June, he joined a boutique transaction advisory and growth strategy firm focused on aerospace and defense markets. (6/6/2025)

Colin Quinn (PhD Anthropology ’17) is assistant professor of anthropology at Hamilton College. (8/16/18)

Douglas Rogers (PhD Anthropology ’04) received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fall 2024 to work on his book project Eating Oil: An Earthly History. (10/4/2024)

Paul Saunders (MA REES/Political Science ’92) was appointed President of the Center for the National Interest in January 2024. Some of his recent publications include “Russia’s Global Energy Role: War, Sanctions, and the Energy Transition” and “Restoring America’s Nuclear Energy Leadership and Exports.” Both reports are available through the Energy Innovation Reform Project, where he was president through December 2023. (10/4/2024)

Monica Sendor (BS Psychology/REES ’09) is an economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in Minsk, Belarus. (8/16/18)

Colonel Daniel Soller (MA REES ’02) retired after more than 31 years in the U.S. Army, most recently as the GEOINT Mission Manager for Space, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. (8/20/20)

Alice I. Sullivan (PhD History of Art ’17) is visiting assistant professor of art history at Lawrence University. (8/16/18)

Mark Trotter (MA Slavic ‘83) retired as Associate Director of Indiana University’s R.F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute after 17 years of service. (6/6/2025)

Stephen Mitchell Tull (PhD Political Science ’95) is the United Nations resident coordinator in Chad. His previous UN postings were Kazakhstan, Geneva, Russian Federation, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. (7/3/19)

Ryan Voogt (MA REES ’10) is lecturer at Lewis Honors College, University of Kentucky. (8/16/18)

Alice Weinreb (PhD History ’09) was awarded the 2017 Wiener Library Fraenkel Book Prize in Contemporary History for Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford, 2017). (8/16/18)

Marcy Wheeler (PhD Comparative Literature ’00) is an independent journalist covering national security and civil liberties, including most recently on the Mueller report and Russian interference in the Trump Campaign, March 2019. (7/3/19)

Harry R. Wilkinson (MA REES ’73) retired from J.P. Morgan Chase as a bank executive. (10/4/2024)

Sharon L. Wolchik (PhD Political Science ‘78) has a forthcoming article "Feminism in Slovakia" in Civic and Uncivic Values in Slovakia: Culture, Media, Gender, and Ethnic Minorities (Macmillan Palgrave 2025), edited by Sabrina Ramet, Christine Marie Hassenstab, and Volodimir Ðorđević. (6/6/2025)

Erika Wolf (MA History of Art ’90, MA REES ’95, PhD History of Art ’99) is professor at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Tyumen in Siberia. (7/3/19)

Jessica Zychowicz’s (PhD Slavic '16) Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine (Toronto 2021) was translated to Polish—Sztuka, feminizm i rewolucje w Ukrainie XXI wieku (Karakter 2024, transl. by Aleksandra Paszkowska). (6/6/2025)