We're very pleased to announce that Dr. Markian Dobczansky will become the new Associate Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at Illinois, starting on November 18th.

Dr. Dobczansky is an experienced researcher, teacher, and administrator who has broad intellectual interests and has lived and worked in many states across the REEES region. A historian by training, he earned his doctorate at Stanford University, defending a dissertation in Soviet, Ukrainian, and urban history focused on Kharkiv in the twentieth century. Dr. Dobczansky has held fellowships at the University of Toronto, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and The George Washington University. Alongside his work on Kharkiv, he has published on the place of Ukraine in Soviet myths after Stalin and edited a special issue of Nationalities Papers on Ukrainian statehood in the twentieth century.  

Since 2022, Dr. Dobczansky has served as the Associate Director of the European Union Center here at Illinois. He brought to this position—and also now to REEEC—connections to a number of important scholarly associations. In 2021–2022, Dr. Dobczansky served as the Society Administrator for the Central Eurasian Studies Society. He also is a Full Member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S. and served as its Administrative Associate in 2021–2022. As his term coincided with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dr. Dobczansky was deeply involved in helping to organize this society's response to the crisis. He has also provided expert public commentary on the war via a number of invited talks to university audiences and interviews to general audience publications.

As a teacher, Dr. Dobczansky has taught and developed a wide range of courses. Before coming to Illinois, he offered classes on the historically entangled relationship between Ukraine and Russia as well as imperial and communist urbanisms across Eurasia. While at the EUC, he taught classes on EUC institutions and governance as well as on the European Union as a global actor, in addition to a new seminar he designed on the history of EU enlargement. He has managed major grants for EUC, including their Department of Education Title VI grants (both NRC and FLAS) as well as their Jean Monnet Center of Excellence grant from the European Union. He speaks and has worked with sources in Ukrainian, Russian, and German and has also studied Armenian and Qazaq.

We are extremely excited that Markian will be able to bring all of these skills and interests to REEEC. We look forward to working with him in this new role.