Visiting Scholars

Irina Dezhina studies science and technology development in Russia and the world. She received her Ph.D. in economics in 1992 from the Institute of National Economic Forecasting (Russian Academy of Sciences), and her D.Sc. degree in economics in 2007 from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (Russian Academy of Sciences). Both her theses were devoted to problems of Russian science policy. 

Dr. Dezhina has been a Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Program “Science, Technology, and Society” (1997), a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies in Washington, D.C. (1994 and 2013). In 1998-1999, she was a Science Policy Analyst at SRI International, Washington, D.C., in 2019 – visiting scholar at the Helsinki University. She has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, CRDF, OECD, APEC, EU Framework Program, and other organizations. In 2016, she was awarded a title Chevalier, The Ordre des Palmes académiques (Order of Academic Palms, France) for works on Russian science and technology policy.

She has published several books and more than 350 articles on these and related topics. Her key monographs are Government Regulation of Science in Russia (Magistr, 2008), Science in the New Russia: Crisis, Aid, Reform (Indiana University Press, 2008) co-authored with Loren Graham, Transformational research: new priority of the state after the pandemic (Gaidar Institute Publishing, 2020), and a chapter in the monograph “Science in a Large Country: a Soviet Management Experience” (RGGU Publishing, 2023). Since 1995, she is the author of the chapter “State of Science and Innovation” in the annual edition “Russian Economy: Trends and Prospects” (Gaidar Institute Publishers).

At Stanford,  Paula will be working toward finishing her book project in which she  examines the economic policy shifts between privatization and nationalization prompted by the interaction of international economic pressures and domestic politics. Inspired by the experience of her family with three different land property rights regimes in the span of seventy years of Romanian history, in this project she scales the analysis to the whole world and use an original data set of privatizations and nationalizations since 1950 as well as data from my extensive fieldwork in Eastern Europe. This project breaks new ground by studying the privatization and nationalization processes together as two sides of the economic policy coin, as well as through new data collected specifically for the quantitative analysis component of the project

Lydia Kamenoff’s doctoral thesis focuses on the history and memory of the Cossacks in France (1924-1945), an original and central theme to better understand the history of Russian emigration in the twentieth century. Located at the crossroads of military history, social history, the history of anticommunism and memory studies, her Ph.D. thesis aims to provide a better understanding of the first wave of Russian emigration, as well as the history of anti-communism and the West-East clashes that agitated twentieth-century Europe. 

The combination of French and American sources will provide the most complete picture possible of the roles and specificities of the Cossacks in emigration to France. Lydia Kamenoff will reconstruct the history and trajectories of the Cossacks who emigrated to France between 1924 and 1945 and examine the manifestations of the ideological struggle of the Cossacks against the Soviets, up to the involvement of some of them in the ranks of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Finally, her work will provide important answers for the understanding of memory issues, as she will analyze how Cossacks tried to preserve their identity and maintain their memory abroad.

Rein Raud is the Distinguished Professor of Asian and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His circle of research interests is broad and ranges from cultural semiotics and sociology to process philosophy and theories of the subject on the one hand, and various aspects of Asian and Western cultural history on the other. His academic books include Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self (Polity, 2021), Asian Worldviews: Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories (Wiley-Blackwell 20121), Meaning in Action: Outline of an Integral Theory of Culture (Polity 2016) and Practices of Selfhood (together with Zygmunt Bauman, Polity 2015). The goal of the present project is to analyze the political, social and cultural discourses that have contributed to the formation of the post-Soviet political subject in its various forms, notably in Russia. Drawing on his theories of selfhood and subjectivity, Rein Raud intends to show how Russian/Soviet culturally specific discourses of subjectivity have contributed to the formation of the present situation in which Russian imperalism is reborn and cordially endorsed by many Russian citizens in an increasingly totalitarian form.

Estonia is globally known for its digital state and start-up culture, but less for its political innovation in the late 1980s, which played an important role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the first Soviet republic to issue a "Declaration of Sovereignty" in November 1988, Estonia established a model for the other republics to follow, culminating in the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. During his stay at Stanford University, Juhan Saharov works on the book project which deals with the question, why did the concept of “sovereignty” emerge at the centre of political discourse in Estonia and not somewhere else? The book highlights the global expert languages and local academic community as pre-existing platforms for Estonian perestroika and traces the conceptual transformation of the idea of the republic's economic independence (self-management) into the project of political independence (sovereignty). The story starts in the 1960s, when Estonia became an economic "experimental republic" in the Soviet Union, and ends with the political action of the Estonian expert and scholarly community during the perestroika period (1986–89). At Stanford, Juhan will work at the Hoover Institution Archive with materials on the economic reforms and sovereignty debates within the Soviet political and academic elite during the period, as well as shares the story of Estonian perestroika with Stanford students and scholars. 

Branko Sekulić received his master’s degree at the Theological Faculty “Matthias Flacius Illyricus” in Zagreb, Croatia (2011), at the Ecumenical Institute of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine (2016), and obtained a certificate in peace education from the Center for Peace Studies in Zagreb (2009). He obtained his doctoral degree at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany (2020), where he has been a post-doctoral researcher (since 2021). He is a lecturer at the University Center for Protestant Theology “Matthias Flacius Illyricus” in Zagreb (since 2017), president of the Institute for Theology and Politics (since 2023), director of the Academy for Theology and Politics (since 2023), coordinator of the theological program of the Festival of Alternatives and the Left in his hometown of Šibenik (since 2014), and a fellow at the Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2024). He recently published The Veils of Christian Delusion, Lanham MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Press, 2022; “Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation”, Political Theology Network, September 2023; “The Theology of the Ethnocultural Empathic Turn: Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation”, Religions 2024, 15, 191.; “Eyes Wide Shut – Orthodoxy and Democracy in Serbian Theology and Thought”, in Pantelis Kalatzaidis – Hans-Peter Großhans (eds.), Politics, Society, and Culture in Orthodox Theology in a Global Age, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2022, and “Theology in the Spirit of Palanka: Catechism of Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox Ethnonationalist Imaginaria”, in Stipe Odak – Zoran Grozdanov (eds.), Balkan Contextual Theology: An Introduction, London-New York: Routledge, 2022.

Ilaria Sicari is a MSCA Postdoctoral Research fellow. Her research project is devoted to the tamizdat (‘published abroad’), a term that refers to Soviet and Eastern European texts unpublished in the Eastern bloc and clandestinely smuggled and published in the West. Being the tamizdat an alternative transnational publishing practice, focusing on the agency of socio-cultural actors (activists of social movements, dissidents, editors, translators, literary agents, critics, diplomats etc.) involved in its production, circulation and reception, it will be possible to outline a comparative intellectual history of the Cultural Cold War in order to demonstrate that state and non-state book diplomacy was fundamental in avoiding the cultural isolation of the two blocs and in promoting the cross-border circulation of knowledge and ideas. 

At CREEES Ilaria will carry out her research under the supervision of Professor Norman Naimark and, during her visiting period at Stanford, she plans to realize a geo-spatial digital visualization of data in collaboration with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).