Berkley Center

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a research professor in the School of Foreign Service, co-convener of the Indigenous Studies Working Group, and a Berkley Center faculty fellow. She has been at Georgetown since 1987 in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and the Anthropology Department, and has twice been a Doyle Faculty Fellow through the Berkley Center. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia, Central Asia, and the Circumpolar North. Her research interests focus on the intersections of religion, politics, ecology, human rights, and comparative indigenous activism. Her latest book, based on fieldwork in three republics, is Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Eduard Ponarin is a tenured professor in the Department of Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is an expert in ethnic and religious minorities in post-Soviet territory, particularly Islamic challenges in former Soviet Republics. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.