[Daviscenter-list] Announcing Spring Visitors

The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies is pleased to welcome several new vistors joining us in the spring semester. You will find their biographies and contact information below.* * *Peter Collmer* is a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Adjunct Professor at the Historical Institute of the University of Zurich. Although his current research focuses on administrative culture in 18^th century Poland, he is well versed in a broad range of historical topics and has taught courses in Russian historical literature in the 19^th century, the military frontier of Habsburg Austria, reform discourse in 18th-century Poland and Russia, and the nation and nationalism in the history of East Central Europe. He completed his dissertation in 2004 at the University of Zurich where he studied relations between Switzerland and Russia, 1848-1919, and has published numerous books and articles in Switzerland. He is affiliated with the Davis Center as a Visiting Scholar for the calendar year 2009. pcollmer(a)fas.harvard.edu. *Amelia Glaser*, an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California, San Diego, earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2004 from Stanford University. Her dissertation was titled /The Marketplace and the Church: Jews, Slavs and the Literature of Exchange, 1829-1929. /Her publications include a book length translation from Yiddish, /Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets /(Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2005), and her translations include works by Mendelstam, Ginzburg and Malevich. She has also published articles in /Jewish Social Studies, East European Jewish Studies, Gendernye Issledovani /and others. She joins the Davis Center as a Visiting Scholar for the spring semester, 2009. amelia.glaser(a)gmail.com. *Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt* is the Chief Rabbi of the Choral Synogogue in Moscow and heads the rabbinical court of the CIS. Goldschmidt played a major role in founding and developing communal structures of post-Soviet Jewry from colleges, day schools, and rabbinical schools, to political umbrella structures, such as the Russian Jewish Congress and the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations of Russia. He has addressed the US Senate, the EU Parliament, The Council of Europe, The Israeli Knesset, Oxford University, and the OSCE Berlin Conference on anti-Semitism regarding Jewish political issues. As a proponent of inter-religious dialogue, he takes an active part in the Jewish-Catholic, and Jewish-Islamic, inter-religious dialogues, speaking at numerous inter-religious gatherings in New York, Paris, Astana, Seville and Moscow. He also leads the Conference of European Rabbis, the rabbinical umbrella group of Europe. Goldschmidt possesses an M.A. from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, as well as an M.S. from Johns Hopkins University. Goldschmidt received the Jerusalem Prize for exceptional spiritual leadership from the Israeli Parliament in the year 2000. He comes to Harvard University as a Daniel Jeremy Silver Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center during the spring 2009 semester. goldschm(a)fas.harvard.edu. *Baktybek Isakov*, a CARTI fellow sponsored by the Open Society Institute, is finishing his Ph.D. in History at the Kyrgyz-Turkish MANAS University. His current project, /Kyrgyz Pastoralism in Song Kol and Changes in Family and Household Organization from Collectivization to Privatization/, relates to his general interest in nomadism, tribalism and kinship in Kyrgyzstan. He has presented papers on Islamic and Shamanistic rituals of childbirth among nomadic Kyrgyz people and the condition of the Kyrgyz government during the reign of the Mongol Empire. He joins the Davis Center as a Fellow in the spring semester 2009. baktybek26(a)mail.ru. *Dmitry Poletaev* is a Senior Researcher in the State Research Institution Council for the Study of Productive Forces in the Russian Academy of Sciences. His current research in the area of irregular migration, and human trafficking has been supported by the International Labor Organization, the Open Society Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation and the Moscow Public Scientific Fund, among others. He earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from the Russian Institute for the Studies of Foreign Economic Relations in Moscow and has published over 40 articles. His dissertation was titled /Illegal Foreign Labor in Russi//a/. He completed his MA in economics with a specialty in statistics in 1996 at the Moscow State Institute of Economics and Statistics. During the spring semester of 2009, Dr. Poletaev is a Sakharov Fellow for Human Rights at the Davis Center. poletaev(a)fas.harvard.edu.