Faculty

I study how everyday people and political elites understand and respond to challenging sociopolitical contexts characterized by weak rule-of-law institutions. I engage with literature in comparative politics, political economy, post-Soviet studies and when relevant history, geography, and anthropology, to better understand the creative, contentious, and politically fraught processes that undergird the creation of new market economies.

Audrey Altstadt is author of dozens of articles on the politics, culture and history of Azerbaijan published in the US, UK, France, Turkey and Azerbaijan. She has been a recipient of various grants including from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Harvard Russian Research Center, the US Institute of Peace. She has been a consultant for Freedom House, Oxford Analytica (UK), Radio Liberty, US Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service, the US State Department, the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other agencies.

Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a multi-disciplinary scholar, with interests at the intersection of culture, history, and film.

I am anthropologist whose research interests include gender, youth and post-socialism, NGOs and global civil society, social welfare and citizenship, and feminist, participatory and collaborative methodologies. I have conducted ethnographic research in Russia since 1997, working collaboratively with Russian feminist scholars and activists in the provincial city Tver.’

My research focuses on the relationship between law and society in Russia, police and law enforcement institutions, civilian oversight, and the issue of human trafficking. My book, Trafficking Justice: How Russian Police Use New Laws, from Crime to Courtroom published by Cornell University Press (2015) explores how Russian law enforcement agencies have implemented laws on human trafficking, and was based on my dissertation which won the Edward S. Corwin Award (best dissertation in Public Law) from the American Political Science Association. I am currently working on a second book project

Alina Parker (Ryabovolova)'s interdisciplinary dissertation discusses politics of history in Russia after the Crimean annexation. Her research interests include postsocialism, Eastern Europe, political contention, far-right politics, and historical memory, which she examines using discursive, performative, and institutional methods of analysis.

Robert A. Rothstein was trained in linguistics by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Roman Jakobson, but also has a long-standing interest in folklore and popular culture. In addition to publications in the field of Slavic linguistics, his bibliography includes such titles as "The Poetics of Proverbs," "Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness," "The Popular Song in Wartime Russia," "The Girl He Left Behind: Women in East European Songs of Emigration," "Klezmer-loshn: The Language of Jewish Folk Musicians," "How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture," “From the Folk

Anna Shkireva’s academic interests include second language acquisition, enhancement of language students’ learning, and instructional strategies to support the development of students’ interest. Her recent work focuses on the impact of a teachers’ authentic care on students’ persistence on the beginning’s level of foreign language courses.

A native of Brussels, Belgium, Jeremi Szaniawski's research and teaching interests include Polish and Russian cinema and literature, Belgian cinema, contemporary auteur film theory and philosophy, women filmmakers, the legacy of Stanley Kubrick (as well as the reception of Kubrick's films in Poland), Marxist theory, and screenwriting. As the Amesbury chair, Jeremi—a native speaker of Polish and French—will also be in charge of teaching Polish and promoting Polish culture across the Five Colleges.

Nataliia Bychkova is an associate professor at the Department of International Economic Relations at Odesa II Mechnikov National University (Odesa, Ukraine), Karl Loewenstein Fellow and visiting professor at the Political Science Department of Amherst College and UMass Amherst (USA), Fellow of the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis (Italy), affiliated member of CFA Institute and Society Ukraine.

Arseniy Kumankov is a visting faculty member in Russian, Eurasian, and Polish studies.