SRAS

The School of Russian and Asian Studies (SRAS) is a team of consultants and advisers dedicated to education and educational opportunities in Russia and Eurasia. They have studied within the Russian educational system and have worked closely with institutions for several years to identify programs of interest and value to international students. Explore their programs and free online resources at www.sras.org.

Program attended: Home and Abroad: Art

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Elizabeth Rogers

Elizabeth Everts Rogers has an undergraduate degree in International Studies from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a master’s in European and Russian Studies from Yale University. She hails originally from Omaha, Nebraska.

Program attended: Home and Abroad: Creative

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Giavana Margo

Giavana Margo is a 2011 graduate of Seattle Pacific University with a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies and English Literature. She has a great love of Eastern Europe which was born out of a summer spent volunteering at a small rural orphanage in Ukraine’s northeastern town of Bogodukhiv. Upon returning to my university in Seattle, she quickly enrolled in Russian language courses hoping to develop an understanding of this culture and region. She has now studied the language for three years and returned to Ukraine on several occasions, independently volunteering in orphanages throughout Ukraine for two more summers. This opportunity afforded her the chance to see the wealth of the Ukrainian landscape and experience the diversity of its people. During her senior year at university, she spent a year abroad, studying literature and art throughout the UK for a semester and then studying Russian language, literature and history St. Petersburg for another semester, taking in Russian art, architecture, music and theatre.

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Taryn Jones

Taryn Jones graduated in 2008 from the University of Victoria (Canada) with her BA in history and anthropology. During that time, she also studied Russian and art history, and was heavily involved with the university’s Russian Studies course union. In January 2012, she will begin her studies at the University of British Columbia in a double Master’s program in library and archival science. Ideally, she would like to work in a gallery or museum’s library or archive. She has traveled throughout Russia on numerous occasions, and first studied in St Petersburg in 2007. In 2009, she traveled across the country, beginning at the Mongolian border and going westwards towards St Petersburg. In recent years, she has studied art history and museum studies in St Petersburg with SRAS. Most recently, she wrote articles for SRAS’s “Cheap Eats” feature and interned in the Youth Education Center of the State Hermitage, where she researched artists, edited English-language texts and translated Russian texts to English. Taryn’s specific artistic interests are the Wanderers, Socialist Realism and photography.

Program attended: Art and Museums in Russia

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Corinne Hughes

Corinne Hughes has studied art and literature for a year at the Evergreen State College in Washington. She has taken a break to spend first a semester in Irkutsk for language immersion and then another semester in St. Petersburg to engage more in cultural studies. She is interested in contemporary Russian and Eurasian artists and her long-term goal is to promote international communication and collaboration between the United States and these regions.

Program attended: The Russian Psyche

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Monika Bernotas

Monika Bernotas graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in European Studies in December of 2011. She is currently living and working in Boston while patiently waiting for news about a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Belarus for the 2012-2013 school year. Her interests include Eastern European culture, global education and international business. This paper was written in autumn of 2011, drawing on research conducted in St. Petersburg over the summer of 2011.

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Kimberly St. Julian

Kimberly St. Julian is finishing a BA in History at Swarthmore College. She plans to begin a Master’s program at Harvard University in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies in the Fall of 2012. She will focus on history as well as the Russian and Serbian languages. Afterwards, she would like to continue to pursue a PhD in history with a focus on Russian and Soviet history. She aspires to become a professor of history.

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Sara Elizabeth Hecker

Sara Elizabeth Hecker is currently studying for an MA in art history, with a concentration on Russian Modernism at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. After graduating, she hopes to work in a museum or gallery setting working under Collections Management/Registrar while continuing her personal studies on Russian art and culture.

Program attended: Art and Museums in Russia

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Nicole Mramor

Nicole Mramor is currently a graduate student in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she also earned her bachelor’s degree in art history. She continues to nourish a fascination with all things art historical, and is especially intrigued by Soviet photography, Russian Formalism, and Constructivist objects. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Slavic Studies, and intensively studied Russian language in St. Petersburg through the School of Russian and Asian Studies (SRAS) in the hopes of reading her favorite authors in their original glory. She additionally enrolled in SRAS’s Art in Russia program, to pursue her artistic proclivities even further. Recently, she has written about the uncanny collision between music and literary theory, and aspires to bridge her pursuits of artistic and academic practice through her scholarship.

Program attended: Art and Museums in Russia

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Sophia Kosar

Sophia Kosar is a sophomore at The College of William and Mary. She spent the summer of 2011 in St. Petersburg, conducting research on the Marine Façade urban development program taking place on the edge of Vasilievsky Island as part of William and Mary's research program. This included interviewing NGO activists, the leader of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko political party, the Chief Architect of St. Petersburg, and representatives of Gazprom and the Marine Façade Management Company. She will spend the 2012/2013 academic year at Kazan State University studying Russian. In the future she hopes to continue her study of Russian and Central Asian cultures, and is interested in a profession dealing with Russian infrastructure and civil-engineering.

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Kristin Torres

Kristin Torres has studied Russian language and literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia and at the Summer Workshop in Slavic and Eastern Languages at Indiana University Bloomington. An aspiring arts and culture journalist, she has a particular focus on Eastern European film and literature. A former intern on the Arts Desk at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. and at California and Missouri affiliates KQED and KBIA, she hopes to further develop her research and arts reporting skills on the Home and Abroad: Art program in St. Petersburg.

Program attended: Home and Abroad: Art

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