Two Senior Russian Majors Recognized for Research Excellence
Howells’ article, “Ideological or Pragmatic? A Data-Driven Analysis of the Russian Presidential Grant Fund,” was published in a recent issue of the scholarly journal Russian Politics.
The article was coauthored with Marlene Laruelle, director of The George Washington University's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs. Howells and Laruelle conducted a data-driven analysis of the Russian Presidential Grant fund, a state institution that is one of the most influential sources of financial support to Russian civil society.
The research for this article was supported by a McKeen Center Bowdoin Public Service Fellowship, which Howells received in the summer of 2019. The grant supported her collaboration with Laruelle at The George Washington University, as well as her work as a research assistant on US-Russia-Europe relations at the Brookings Institution. Howells was recently awarded a Fulbright Study/Research award to carry out research on cyber security in Estonia next year.
Kalandarov was honored with the top prize in the history category at the Macalester Russian Studies Virtual Student Research Competition on May 2. Kalandarov presented his research live (via Zoom) during the competition. His submission was the first chapter of his honors thesis, “The Soviets and Americans in Afghanistan: A Clausewitzian Framework for Comparative Conflict Analysis.” Kalandarov completed his thesis this year in the department of government and legal studies under the guidance of Christian Potholm, Bowdoin's DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government.
The competition was organized by the Russian Studies department at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Faculty judges from Macalester and beyond selected award winners in three thematic categories: literature, interdisciplinary studies, and history. The competition included submissions by sixteen students representing ten colleges and universities across the nation, and prize-winners hailed from Duke, Indiana, and Carnegie Mellon Universities in addition to Macalester and Bowdoin Colleges. The virtual version of the annual Macalester College student research competition was envisioned as a means of allowing students nationwide to connect with each other across distances and disciplinary boundaries during a time of upheaval.
“It was very interesting to hear other students’ work, which included research on Gorbachev's prohibition policy, Czarist relations with Central Asian kingdoms, and the Sino-Soviet Split, among other things,” Kalandarov reported after the competition.
For his first prize award, he will receive a cash prize and the book Robert Frost in Khrushchev's Russia. This latest honor follows upon his recent first prize in the 2020 John Quincy Adams Society/The National Interest student foreign policy essay contest.