Friday, May 15, 2026
2026 Next Generation Fellows Announced
ASEEES congratulates the 2026 Next Generation Research Fellows. We thank the generous donors to the ASEEES Next Generation Emergency Research Fund for supporting this program.
Zhanara Almazbekova (Georgetown University) “Coercive Modernization: Women’s Liberation in Soviet Central Asia (1917-1956)”
How did local women respond to the Soviet revolutionary call in Central Asia after 1917? Some, like Shairbubu Tezikbaeva and Zuurakan Kaynazarova, enthusiastically joined the socialist cause, both becoming one of the first female Kyrgyz deputies in the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1939. Their transformation from illiterate farmworkers into educated political leaders embodied the ambitions of the Bolshevik state but, above all, exemplified the ongoing Soviet emancipation project aimed at overturning women’s oppression. My dissertation examines this emancipatory program’s ideological foundations and practical outcomes in Central Asia through a focused case study of Soviet Kyrgyzstan between 1917 and 1956. Centering on local women-activists, it analyzes their encounters with, and responses to, Bolshevik initiatives aimed at achieving gender equality. In particular, the project investigates women’s roles in two key arenas of Soviet emancipation: literacy campaigns and legal reforms targeting traditional marriage practices. By foregrounding local, principally women-actors, my thesis explores not only the lived experiences of the Bolshevik pursuit of a socialist utopia but also the broader intersections of gender with state-building, national identity formation, and modernization in Soviet Central Asia.
Ivan Cherniakov (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) “‘State Farms in Construction:’ Photography and the Making of the Soviet Agricultural Landscape”
Anne D. Rassweiler Dissertation Research Fellow
My dissertation focuses on the pictorial genre of agricultural landscape as constructed by photographers in the Soviet Union during collectivization in the 1930s. I aim to understand how the Soviet agricultural landscape generated novel representational devices, progressive and affirmative, yet also complicit in obscuring famine, environmental degradation, economic dependency, and poverty. In my project, I examine photographic representations from archival sources and the illustrated press, with particular focus on the magazine Na Stroike MTS I Sovkhozov (State Farms and Machine Tractor Stations in Construction) (1934-37). By far the most spectacular print venue devoted to collectivization, State Farms developed proposals for ways of conceiving the relationships between land and labor by featuring stories about collectivization across numerous Soviet republics, including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Using the genre of landscape as my main analytical framework, I ask how a focus on visual materials can contribute to understandings of collectivization’s outcomes in different territorial, national, and ethnic contexts. I explore how landscape representations served to refashion land use and national and class identities of recently “decolonized” subjects of the Russian Empire, at the same time as the Soviet economy became increasingly reliant on their resources and labor.
Genevieve Dally-Watkins (Harvard University) “Bordered Bodies & Borderless Dose: Radioactivity, Ecology, and Empire from the Soviet Century to Today”
Alexey Kotelvas (University of Florida) “Divided Nations: Politics of Identity in Romanian-Moldovan Tourism and Cultural Diplomacy (1964-1991)”
“Divided Nations” examines the history of Romanian-Moldovan tourism and cultural diplomacy (1965-1991). Despite being socialist states, the USSR and Romania maintained a complex and often contentious relationship from the 1960s onward. In the case of the Moldovan SSR, this tension was particularly pronounced due to historical territorial disputes and the military conflict of World War II. While sharing very similar cultures, the emphasis on their differences became politically significant. For example, Soviet Moldova adopted the Cyrillic alphabet to write Romanian, officially referring to the language as “Moldovan.” The Moldovan case is particularly noteworthy due to the separation of two languages, a phenomenon that is rare in world history. This research explores how identity politics were enacted through tourism and cultural diplomacy practices. The limited and carefully curated Romanian-Moldovan encounters appear to have been designed not to bring the two nations closer, but to encourage them to disregard their shared history. Alongside earlier studies on Ukraine-Poland, Azerbaijan-Turkey, and Karelia-Finland, this research contributes to the development of new generalizations about Soviet diplomatic strategies in border regions. The project also sheds light on the ideological compromises made by communist Romania in balancing between the two superpowers.