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) was named a 2019-20 U-M Institute for the Humanities postdoctoral fellow for the project “Cultural Remix: Polish Hip Hop and the Sampling of Heritage.” (7/3/19)

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)

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 (MA Slavic ’99, PhD Slavic ’05) published the translation of The Freedom Factory by Ksenia Buksha (Phoneme Media, 2018) and The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin w/ D. Mong (White Pine, 2018). (7/3/19)

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)

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 Political Science/REES ’88) completed three years as Deputy Chief of Mission to Hungary, two of which were spent as Charge d'affaires (acting ambassador). In August 2019, he became director for the Balkans at the Department of State, responsible for U.S. policy toward South Central Europe. (8/1/19)

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, BSE AeroEng ‘87, MSE AeroEng ‘88) ran a successful experiment on the Intuitive Machines IM-1 lunar lander in early 2024 through his startup, Lonestar Media Holdings, and is planning their next mission to the Moon in November 2024. (10/4/2024)

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

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)

Raymond Patton (MA REES ’05, PhD History ’11), director of the Macaulay Honors College and associate professor of history at John Jay College, CUNY, published Punk Crisis: The Global Punk Rock Revolution (Oxford UP, 2018). (7/3/19)

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) is starting a PhD in political science in at the University of Texas at Austin. (8/20/20)

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)

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)

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 (PhD Slavic ’15) is a postdoctoral fellow at CUSP: Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program, University of Alberta. She received a 2017-18 Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for the project “Lifting the Digital Iron Curtain: A Social and Cultural History of the Red Web,” which she researched in Kyiv, Ukraine. (7/3/19)