Biography
Eden is a first-year REEES MA student originally from Northern California. She earned her B.A. from the University of Toronto (Canada), majoring in European Affairs and Slavic Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Russian. She has been studying Russian since high school, and began study of Ukrainian at UofT in 2021, which she is continuing at Illinois. Her academic interests lie in Russian-language media, the relationship between post-Soviet states (especially Ukraine), Russia, and the West, and Soviet operations in the Nordics. Outside of academia, Eden enjoys traveling, hiking, cycling, reading, writing, and learning new languages.
Research Interests
Portrayal of non-Russian ethnicities and nationalities in Russian-language media
the Caucasus in Russian literary imagination
the integration of post-Soviet states into the EU and NATO
Soviet influence and operations in the Nordics
the Cold War in Iceland
Research Description
Eden plans to focus her thesis either on Russian government-sponsored and influenced media and its effects on the integration of post-Soviet states into the "west," or on Soviet influence and operations in Iceland.
At the University of Toronto, she worked with Dr. Kate Holland on Digital Dostoevsky, a computational text analysis project on a corpus of 7 works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. More information on the project can be found at https://digitaldostoevsky.com/.
Education
Honours B.A. with High Distinction in European Affairs and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, 2023
Middlebury College School of Russian (summer study at Level 7), 2022