Our participants—friends, alumni, and affiliates of CSEES and Ohio State who are living across Eastern and Southern Europe and in the Caucasus— in the Notes from the Field blog series are:
Eric Bednarski, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Warsaw, was due to screen his film Warsaw: A City Divided at the Wexner Center for the Arts on April 5th. As a result of the pandemic, the screening had to be cancelled. There are tentative plans to reschedule a screening of this fascinating documentary sometime in November.
Jessie Labov is a resident of Budapest, Hungary. She is a Resident Fellow of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University, as well as the Director of Academic and Institutional Development at McDaniel College Budapest. Prior to moving to Budapest, Jessie was a professor of Slavic and East European languages and cultures at Ohio State.
Ann Merrill, a translator and tour leader with CHERNOBYL TOUR® Educational Programs, graduated from Ohio State with a BA in Russian and an MA in TESOL and has been living for some years in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Kathryn Metz is a former outreach coordinator for the Center for Slavic and East European Studies (CSEES). She holds an MA in Human Rights from Central European University and she has carried out extensive field work in the Balkans supporting refugees and migrants.
Adela Muchova is PhD Candidate at the University of Vienna who currently is residing in Prague, Czech Republic. She works as a project manager for European Platform, an educational NGO focused on European themes.
Emma Pratt is a 2011 graduate of the CSEES MA program in Slavic and East European studies. A long-time resident of Tbilisi, Georgia, she currently works as lecturer at the International School of Economics.
Conrad Rinto is a 2017 graduate of the CSEES MA program in Slavic and East European studies. Since fall 2019, Conrad has been based in Budapest, Hungary as the Ohio National Guard Liaison in the U.S. Embassy there as part of the Ohio National Guard’s state partnership program.
Lyudmila Skryabina, who holds a PhD in history and ethnography, lives in Moscow and works with the film production company OKAPI and as a consultant for the ethnographic museum Tom River Cliff-Drawings in Kemerovo, Siberia.
Tatiana Shchytssova is a professor at and director of the Center for Research of Intersubjectivity and Interpersonal Communication at the European Humanities University and is also president of The International Association for the Humanities (IAH). She currently lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. The IAH 2020 International Congress was originally scheduled to take place in June and is now being rescheduled for early October.
Jesse Smeal, a 2003 graduate of John Cabot University in Rome, has a BA in International Affairs as well as an MA from St. John’s University in International Relations. He owns and operates two American-style restaurants called Homebaked–Grandma’s Kitchen, both located in Rome, Italy.