CREEES Welcomes New Visiting Scholars Winter Quarter

This quarter, two additional visiting scholars will join the Center: Philipp Casula and Fabio De Leonardis, the Wayne Vucinich Visting Scholar.

Philipp Casula is a post-doctoral researcher at the History Department of the University of Zurich. He obtained his PhD at Basel University defending a thesis on the political discourse in contemporary Russia. At Zurich University, he works in a collaborative research project on representations of security in the Soviet Union and Russia. Within this framework, his current research focuses on the visual history of the Red Army’s occupation of Afghanistan in the Soviet media, paying special attention to depictions of the Other in Soviet newspapers.

Fabio De Leonardis is currently editor of the journal, Nazioni e Regioni (Nations and Regions – Studies and Researches on Imagined Communities).  He obtained his PhD in Theory of Language and Sciences of Signs from the University of Bari. De Leonardis’ intellectual interests are broad, and he has worked extensively on nationalism and nationalist ideology in a comparative context. His current research interests are focused n nationalism and nationalist ideology in comparative context. At Stanford, he will continue to work on his current research project, which analyzes Saparmurat Niyazov’s cult of personality in Turkmenistan in a comparative context with Kaddafi’s regime in Libya.

Philipp and Fabio will be joining two other CREEES visiting scholars. Sreten Ugričić will be here through June 2014, and Magnus Ilmjärv will be here through May 2014.