Meet Our Scholars

The Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) hosts scholars from around the world who are conducting research on topics related to Europe and/or Eurasia (the territory corresponding to the former Soviet Union). These visiting scholars include senior scholars, post-doctoral scholars, and advanced graduate students. Visiting Scholars present on their research as part of IERES’ visiting scholar roundtable event series. 

Catherine Dale, Visiting Scholar
Negotiating with Russia: Reflections from Years of Making Peace in Abkhazia, Georgia

Catherine Dale is a scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on Russia and Eurasia. She has led teams in designing and conducting cutting-edge research on war and peace in the region, in past roles as Vice President for Russia and Europe at the United States Institute of Peace, and as Director of the Center for Russia and Eurasia at RAND. As a practitioner, she has served as strategic advisor to a number of senior military commanders, including the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Earlier, as Special Assistant to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Georgia, she helped design and lead a peace process aimed at achieving a political settlement between Georgia and its breakaway region Abkhazia. That experience is an inspiration for her Visiting Scholar project at GWU. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation focused on long-term internal displacement following violent conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Before transferring to Berkeley, she began her graduate studies at IERES at the Elliott School, and she is delighted to be part of the community again!

Ivan Hristov, Visiting Scholar
Reuben Markham’s Concept of Totalitarianism

Dr. Ivan Hristov’s work focuses on Bulgarian literature 20th-21st century within a European context. He received his PhD from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 2009. His dissertation was dedicated to one of the most interesting and least-studied circles of modernist intellectuals from the 1920s: the Sagittarius Circle. Already here in his first book titled “The Sagittarius Circle and the Idea of the Native” that explored the crisis of Bulgarian national identity after the First World War, he touched upon some aspects of totalitarianism. He showed how fragile the democratic tradition was in Bulgaria and how, after the civil war of 1925, totalitarianism began to gain traction in Bulgarian society and liberal democracy became increasingly vulnerable.

Expanding his scientific capacity, Hristov turned to the problem of totalitarianism, which reached its climax during the Second World War. He wrote a series of articles that examined the relationship between modernism and different types of totalitarian ideologies. His contributions in this respect include publications on the social transformations carried out by the then-new social media such as radio, cinema and the poster, his articles on the relationship between modernist and social realist writers, on the rehabilitation of modernism in Bulgaria in the 1970s, and on Bulgarian poetry of the 1980s and modernism. Thanks to the American Research Center in Sofia Fellowship for Southeast European Scholars, which Dr. Hristov won in 2015, he was able to conceptualize and lay the groundwork for his second monographic study. In 2022, the resulting work “Bulgarian Literary Modernism: The Problem of Time and Identity” was published. In this book he carefully traces the origins, rise and decline of communist totalitarianism in Bulgaria from the 1920s to the 1980s. In it he shows how media such as radio and film helped to amplify totalitarian movements and led to the loss of the individual self and the collapse of liberal democracy. Hristov carefully and thoroughly presents an account of how modernism was gradually rehabilitated in Bulgarian literature in the 1970s and even began to influence the literary processes of the 1980s. Dr. Ivan Hristov is the author also of over thirty articles within the field of Bulgarian literary modernism and postmodernism. He currently works as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Ivan Hristov’s Fulbright project “Reuben Markham’s Concept of Totalitarianism” at George Washington University will contribute not only to the promotion and rehabilitation of the importance that Markham has for Bulgarian and European history and culture, but also will achieve a more detailed picture and improve the conceptual clarity of the term “totalitarianism,” something that is extremely important for contemporary Bulgarian society.

Non-Resident Scholars

Gabriela Argüello, Non-resident Scholar
Security of Underwater Critical Maritime Infrastructure in Europe

Gabriela Argüello, BA, LL.M, LL.D, is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Law in the University of Gothenburg. She is also a research fellow funded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Gabriela specializes in the law of the sea and is affiliated with both the Centre for Collective Action Research (CeCAR) and the Centre for Sea and Society. Gabriela earned her Maritime and Transport Law doctorate from the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary global environmental challenges related to the ocean, particularly those involving multi-scale actors such as states, international organizations, industries, and civil society organizations. She has conducted research on a range of topics, including waste management, pesticides, ship recycling, ship-source pollution, ocean governance, and energy transitions. In addition to her academic work, Gabriela is a member of the European Marine Board Working Group on Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (2024–2026) and is a Fulbright Arctic Initiative IV Scholar (2024–2026).

Aikerim Bektemirova, Non-resident Scholar
Between Autonomy and Control: The Evolution of the Kazakhstani Academy of Sciences in the Post-Soviet Era

Aikerim Bektemirova is a researcher from Kazakhstan who recently completed her PhD in Education at the University of Cambridge. Before that, she earned an MPhil in Education, Globalisation, and International Development from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and International Relations from Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Her research interests lie at the intersection of education, politics, and sociology, with a particular focus on knowledge production in higher education institutions.

Esuna Dugarova, Non-resident Scholar
The Cost-of-living Crisis and Policy Responses in Eurasia through a Gender Lens

Esuna Dugarova is an interdisciplinary scholar and policy expert specializing in public policy, socio-economic development, and gender equality globally, with a particular focus on Eurasia. With extensive experience in international organizations and academia—including the UN, World Bank, European Commission, and Columbia University—she has led global projects, policy analysis, and rigorous assessments, providing evidence-based insights that shaped decision-making. In addition, Esuna has conducted primary research on the interplay between identity, power, and agency through the lens of the transnational Buryat-Mongolian community and founded the Global Buryat Academy to sustain its language and culture. Holding a PhD from Cambridge University, Esuna has authored over 50 publications and knows 7 languages, including Mongolian, Chinese, Russian, and French.

Reijer Pieter Hendrikse, Non-resident Scholar
Back to the Illiberal Future? From Habsburg to MAGA Court

Reijer Hendrikse is a non-resident fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program. His research interests are centered on the interfaces between corporations, business services, financial centers, and states, with a focus on finance, lawmaking, technology, and their political anchoring under (neo-)illiberalizing regimes in the US, China and Europe. Amongst others, he is currently investigating the financialization and monopolization of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructures under the aegis of US Big Tech, and how these companies rely on the illiberal antics of the Trump Administration to shield and expand their global dominance.

Carter Johnson, Non-resident Scholar
From Inside or Outside the Homeland? Strategic Pathways to Power for Opposition Leaders in Authoritarian Regimes

Between 2012 and 2022, Carter Johnson was a faculty member at HSE University in Moscow; his academic research has been published in the academic journals World Politics, International Security, and Europe-Asia Studies, among others, as well as the Washington Post. In 2021 his book, Partition and Peace in Civil Wars, was published by Routledge; it was released as a paperback in 2023. Carter also serves as a Chief Strategy Officer and Regional Director at American Councils for International Education, overseeing Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Mongolia. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jacob Ware, Non-resident Scholar
Combatting Youth Radicalization

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press. He was previously a research associate for counterterrorism at CFR.

In addition to his work at CFR, Ware is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. Jacob was also a spring 2024 younger visiting fellow at the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism. He serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative. His work has appeared in publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, National Interest, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. 

Ware holds an MA in security studies from Georgetown and an MA (Hons) in international relations and modern history from the University of St Andrews.

Past Visiting Scholars

2019-2020 Visting Scholars

• Iakovos Michailidis, The Reconstruction of Greece after World War II: The Role of UNNRA
• Stefan Kaschube, Multi-National Corporations as Instruments in International Relations – the Role of American Extratteritorial Sanctions
• Per Ekman, Foreign Policy Strategies of Ukraine and Georgia
• Zarina Burkadze, Competing Foreign Influences and Domestic Coordination in Democratizing Georgie: EU, NATO, US, and Russia
• Bekzod Zakirov, From Market to the State: Politics of State Ownership in Kazakhstan and Russia 
• Irina Olimpieva, Russian Young People’s Perceptions of Corruption and the Resulting Influence on Political and Economic Behavior
• Liliya Karimova, By the Grace of God: Women, Islam, and Transformation in Russia
• Aisalkyn Botoeva, Emergence and Expansion of the Islamic Economy in Central Asia
• Derya Butuktanir Karacan, The Impact of Syrian Refugess in Hungary and Germany
• Emmanuel Dreyfus, Russian Defense Reforms Since 2008

2018-2019 Visiting Scholars

• Uchkun Dustov, Sino-American Relationship at the Beginning of the XXI Century
• Miguel Vazquez, New Regulatory Paradigms to Realize Engery Transitions in the European Union
• Daria Gritsenko, Sustainable Energy for the Arctic Regions
• Daniel Stahl, The Arms Trade and International Law in the 20th Century
• Emil Nasritdinov, Migration in Kyrgyzstan: Here, There and in Between

2017-2018 Visiting Scholars

• Stephen Crowley, The Other Russia: Labor Politics and the Putin Regime in Challenging Economic Times
• Nicolas Belorgey, Prospective Payments Systems and the Elderly: A Frano-American Comparison
• Elzbieta Olzacka, The Cultural Context of the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine
• Gabor Csizmazia, The United States’ Security Relationship with Europe’s Eastern Flank
• Sielke Beata Kelner, US Human Rights Promotion in Eastern Europe: The Case of Romania (1977-1989)
• Katerina Sokou, The US’s Role in the Greek Debt Crisis
• Lauren Woodard, Resettlement of Compatriots Program in Russia’s Far East