Miami University

Havighurst Center Associates

Core Havighurst Faculty

Venelin Ganev, Political Science
Venelin I. Ganev obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2000. After a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Notre Dame University, in 2001 he joined the Department of Political Science at Miami University of Ohio; since then he has also been a faculty associate of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. His main fields of interest are postcommunist politics, democratization studies, constitutionalism, and modern social theory. His publications have appeared in East European Constitutional Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Democracy, East European Politics and Societies, Communist and Postcommunist Studies, Slavic Review and Europe-Asia Studies. He has also contributed chapters to several volumes that explore various aspects of institution-building in contemporary Europe. In 2003-4 Professor Ganev was a National Fellow at The Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His first book, Preying on the State: The Transformation of Postcommunist Bulgaria was published in June 2007 by Cornell University Press.

Scott Kenworthy, Comparative Religion
Scott has a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in English and Religious Studies (1990), and an M.A. from U.C. Santa Barbara in Religious Studies (1993), MA from St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary (Crestwood, NY) in Theology (1996), and Ph.D. in History at Brandeis University. His dissertation was "The Revival of Monasticism in Modern Russia: The Trinity-Sergius Lavra, 1825-1921." In 2006-7 he was a fellow of the Kennan Institute in Washington DC. Scott Kenworthy's teaching interests include Eastern Christianity, the history of Christian thought, and the religions of Russia and Eurasia. His research interests focus on Eastern Orthodoxy in modern Russia. Current projects include a book entitled To Renounce the World: Reviving Monasticism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russia

Klumbyte

Neringa Klumbyte, Anthropology
Neringa Klumbyte (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2006)
Neringa Klumbyte’s research interests lie at the intersection of political and economic anthropology, Eurasian and European Union studies, post-socialism, and post-colonialism. Within these fields she has explored a variety of issues, including national identities and the production of national belonging and subjectivity; experiences of the neoliberal state and post-Soviet authority and power; memory and nostalgia for Soviet times; symbolic geopolitics in (EU)rope; and political marketing of food and its consumption. Her forthcoming book, Biographic Citizenship: Memory, Subjectivity, and Politics in Post-Soviet Lithuania, explores people’s political subjectivities and political behavior during national and EU elections as well as through their consumption of political brands like “Soviet” sausages.

Norris Stephen M. Norris, History
Stephen Norris's (Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2002) work studies popular images and propaganda in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. His book, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945, was published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2006. He has published in the journals Ab Imperio, National Identities, and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. He also served as the project director for Houghton Mifflin's web-based western civilization project, entitled Mosaic: Perspectives on Western Civilization. His teaching interests include Russian cultural history and film history. He is presently working on a book about Post-Soviet film.

Daniel Prior, History and Executive Director of CESS
Daniel Prior (Ph.D. Indiana University, 2002) teaches Central Asian and world history and researches the history, cultures, and folklore of Central Asia, mainly of Turkic nomadic peoples. His current research project, for which he was awarded an NEH Fellowship, is a history of the northern Kirghiz chieftains (manaps) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Semetey of Kenje Kara: A Kirghiz epic performance on phonograph (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2006), and numerous articles and reviews. Daniel Prior taught previously at Ohio State University and Indiana University, and was head of the library of the Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies at Indiana University. He has lived in China, Japan, and for three and a half years in Kirghizstan, before and after its independence from the Soviet Union.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Political Science & ITS
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova studies issues related to the rule of law and elite accountability in the democratization of post-communist countries. After receiving her MA in International Affairs from the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Sharafutdinova returned to her native Tatarstan for a year. From 1997–98 she was senior officer of the Department on Asia and Africa in the Foreign Affairs Office of the President of the Republic of Tatarstan. She holds a PhD in political science from George Washington University. In 2005-6, she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame University. Focusing on Russia’s regions, her work combines statistical analysis and a case study of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Anna Sokolina, Architecture & Interior Design Education
· Certficate Program in Arts Administration. New York University
· Ph.D. Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences
· M.Arch. Moscow Architectural Institute

Faculty and Staff with Interests in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Sheldon Anderson, History

Ricardo Averbach, Music

Robert Benson, Architecture & Interior Design

Dilchoda Berdieva, Political Science

Howard Blanning, Theater

Andrew Cayton, History

Gulen Cevik, Architecture

Vitaly Chernetsky, German, Russian, East Asian Languages

Frederick Colby, Religion