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 18th
century Poland, he is well versed in a broad range of historical topics
and has
taught courses in Russian historical literature in the 19th
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@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@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@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@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 Russia. 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@fas.harvard.edu.