New OSF Eurasia Fellows start at CEURUS

Two new OSF Eurasia Fellows – Irakli Sirbiladze (Georgia) and Viktoriia Svyrydenko (Ukraine) will be conducting five-month residential fellowships at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu.

The OSF Eurasia Fellowship programme was launched in autumn 2016 with the aim of enabling young Eurasian social scientists to develop their analytical and research skills, build international networks and contribute to global debates. The programme targets doctoral students and PhD-holding academics in 11 countries: Eastern Europe (Moldova, Ukraine), the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).

During the five-month residence, fellows will work directly with their academic supervisors on their research projects and will be able to participate in local and regional conferences, seminars and workshops as well as take additional training and courses offered by the university.  According to Anna Beitane, one of the programme’s coordinators, “the overall experience has been very positive both for the fellows and the institute. We are happy to welcome Irakli and Viktoriia to the institute”.

Irakli Sirbiladze is a PhD student at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. His research interests include Russian foreign policy, Georgian foreign policy, theories of International Relations and the critical security studies. “My PhD dissertation focuses on Russian foreign policy, and the University of Tartu offers world-class academic knowledge and expertise in this regard. This fellowship will be critical in bringing my dissertation, both methodology and content wise, in line with the best research practices,” explains Irakli.

Viktoriia Svyrydenko holds a doctoral degree in history from the M. S. Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies, National Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, Ukraine. Her areas of expertise include East Central European history, memory studies, and borderland studies. In the words of Viktoriia, “a research stay at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies is a great chance not only to present my own research project, but also to receive expert comments on it. This fellowship will help me broaden my perspective on the ways in which different agents of memory attempt to influence identity constructions in contemporary Ukraine.”

More information about the programme and previous fellows is available here. For additional questions, please contact Anna Beitane, anna.beitane@ut.ee

The program is supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations’ Eurasia Program.