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.