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).

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project is devoted to the tamizdat (‘published abroad’), a term that refers to Soviet and Eastern European texts unpublished in the Eastern bloc and clandestinely smuggled and published in the West.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).