Rusana Novikova
WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2026-28
Rusana Novikova is a sociocultural anthropologist, documentarian, and podcaster based at the University of Michigan. Her research examines land, infrastructure, abandonment, and recolonization in Russia’s Far East, with a particular focus on the Hectare program. This research grew out of her fascination with the Far Eastern countryside that has been going through a dramatic change following the collapse of the Soviet Union, widespread industry closures, and massive outmigration. Essentially, her work is concerned with the process she calls feral drift, which emerges when both people and industries leave.
When she's not writing or wandering into the weeds, she likes to interview fellow travelers for the Eurasian Knot, an audio podcast on Russian, East European, and Eurasian culture, history, and politics. In 2023, she released Ainu Fever, an audio documentary that grew out of her fieldwork and explores conservation, land rights, and the layered colonial history of Sakhalin Island by following a complicated friendship between a Russian environmentalist and an Ainu community leader.
Education
PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 2026.
MA, Anthropology, European University at St. Petersburg, 2016.
BA, Linguistics and Translation, Tomsk Polytechnic University, 2009.
Grants and Fellowships
2025, 2021 UC Berkeley Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Summer Research Fellowship
2024-25 UC Berkeley Graduate Division, Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2023-24 National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Dissertation Completion Grant
2023 UC Berkeley Graduate Writing Center, Summer Dissertation Writing Grant
2022-23 UC Berkeley Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Academic Year Dissertation Fellowship
2022-23 UC Berkeley Global, International, and Area Studies, John L. Simpson Research Fellowship
2021-22 UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, Diebold Fellowship in Linguistic Anthropology
2020-21 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Dissertation Research Grant
2020 UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Pre-Dissertation Research Grant
2018 The California Language Archive, Oswalt Endangered Language Grant
Danielle Leavitt
WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-27
Danielle Leavitt is a historian of modern Ukraine and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Russian and Ukrainian relations, human age, generation, and gender. Her work examines the function of generation and human age in Soviet history and works to insert the stories of underrepresented populations, such as the elderly and women, into consequential debates about stagnation, cultural life, Soviet collapse, post-Soviet economic and political development, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Dr. Leavitt’s first book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (2025, FSG), charted the lives of seven Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Based on a unique set of online diaries, Leavitt contextualized her seven subjects, Ukrainian society, and its predicaments for a wide audience, introducing readers to a rigorous but accessible history of Ukraine, the Soviet Union, its collapse, and Russia’s historical relationship with its neighbors.
Leavitt received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2023. From 2023-2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Education
- PhD, History, Harvard University, 2023
- MA, History, Harvard University, 2018
- BA, Russian, Brigham Young University, 2015
Awards and Honors
- 2022 Harvard Griffin GSAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
- 2021, 2019 Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship
- 2020, 2017 HURI Summer Research Grant
- 2018 Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Summer Research Grant
- 2016 Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Scholarship, Harvard University
- 2016 Merle Fainsod Prize, Harvard University
- 2015 Russian Scholar Laureate, The American Council of Teachers of Russian
