Hilary Brownell

Hilary Brownell

Hilary (Hilly) McCandless-Beard is a first-year graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She earned her BA in Russian and Eurasian Studies from Colorado College in 2019. Her undergraduate research focused on traditional Russian rye bread and Soviet cuisine. Hilary is currently pursuing graduate studies both as an MA student at the Middlebury Language Schools Davis School of Russian (beginning summer 2019), and as a PhD student in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, where she teaches introductory Russian language. Her research interests include: twentieth-century literature; Soviet culture; Andrei Platonov; Mikhail Zoshchenko; food, hunger and famine in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Email
Email

Evangelina Demina

Evangelina Demina

Evangelina Demina is a first-year PhD student in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. Evangelina holds M.A. and B.A. in Pedagogy from Yelets Bunin State University in Russia. In 2017, she was performing the duties of a Russian TA at The City University of New York where she spent an academic year as part of Fulbright FLTA program. Evangelina earned her M.A. in Russian Studies from The University of Colorado, Boulder in 2020. Her research explores intersections between various techniques of capturing “uncertainty” from the late 18thcentury to the present. She is also interested in Russian postmodernist literature, its origin, and evolution. Evangelina enjoys teaching Russian and different aspects of Russian culture. 

Email
Email
Anna Gomboeva

Anna Gomboeva

Anna Gomboeva

Anna Gomboeva is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Presidential Academy in Novosibirsk, Russia. Anna’s interests include postcolonial studies in the former Soviet Union with primary focus on the literatures of indigenous Siberian writers. She is also investigating the history of colonizing traditions in Russian academia, their function in the Soviet system of knowledge production and the impact it has had on contemporary Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian studies.

Email
Email

Michael Misbach

Michael Misbach

Email
Email
Jason Shultz

Jason Schultz

Jason Schultz

Email
Email
Alexandra Shapiro

Alexandra Shapiro

Alexandra Shapiro

Email
Email
Aaron Thompson

Aaron Thompson

Aaron Thompson

Aaron Thompson is a second-year PhD student in SLL and the president of the Society of Slavic Graduate Students for the 2019-2020 academic year. Aaron received a dual B.A. in Russian and anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2015, and then lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he worked for an education consultancy. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to study primarily how Russian literature from 1850-1950 created, supported, and deconstructed ideology, especially ideologies of religious institutions. He is most interested in the ways through which writers and poets sought to answer existential questions Russia faced on the nature of the connection between the individual self and the whole community. Aaron is also a candidate for the Digital Humanities certificate and a founding member of the Russian Natural Language Processing research group. In his spare time Aaron enjoys exploring Virginian nature on and off his motorcycle and cooking foods from around the world with his cat, Lev.

Email
Email