FPRI Announces 2018 Eurasia Fellows

• January 26, 2018

The Foreign Policy Research Institute is pleased to announce that Stephen Kotkin, Robert Hamilton, Selim Koru, Anke Schmidt-Felzmann, and Indra Ekmanis have been named as Fellows in FPRI’s Eurasia Program.

Stephen Kotkin (Eurasia Fellow)

Stephen Kotkin is the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he directs the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and co-directs the Program in the History and Practice of Diplomacy.  He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  Stephen’s essays and reviews appear in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, and the TLS.  His Stalin: volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The second installment, Stalin: volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941, was released in 2017 to great critical acclaim.  Stephen Kotkin will also be the featured speaker at the 2018 Annual Champagne Brunch for Partners, presenting on “What Everyone Needs to Know about Putin.”

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Robert Hamilton (Black Sea Fellow)

A professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College, he has served as a strategic war planner and country desk officer at U.S. Central Command, as the Chief of Regional Engagement for Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, and as the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Georgia and as the Deputy Chief of the Security Assistance Office at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan. He has written extensively on the war between Russia and Georgia and the security situation in the former Soviet Union. Colonel Hamilton holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Virginia.

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Selim Koru (Black Sea Fellow)

Selim Koru is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV), where his research focuses on Turkish politics and foreign policy. Before TEPAV, he worked and interned at various media organizations. Selim holds a BA in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison an MA in International Relations and Economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Koru has published in outlets such as War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.

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Anke Schmidt-Felzmann (Baltic Sea Fellow)

 Anke Schmidt-Felzmann holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK) and is currently lecturing at the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania in Vilnius. She has been a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in the Special Research Programme on International Studies (Särskilda forskningsprogrammet, SFP) and a post-doctoral fellow at Stockholm University with a grant from the Swedish Research Agency (Vetenskapsrådet). Over the past five years she has been a visiting researcher at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs (LIIA) in Riga, at the Centre for EU-Russia Studies in Tartu (Estonia), at ARENA Centre of European Studies at the University of Oslo, at the Centre for European Politics at Copenhagen University and at the Danish Institute of International Affairs (DIIS). 

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Indra Ekmanis (Baltic Sea Fellow)

Indra Ekmanis is a Title VIII Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute in the Woodrow Wilson Center. She completed her PhD in International Studies at University of Washington in 2017 where her research focused on social integration and democratic transition in Latvia. Her current project examines the effects of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on Baltic independence movements and post-Soviet transition.

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FPRI would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Equinox Partners, L.P., J.J. Medveckis Foundation, Audrey and Martin Gruss Foundation, Leo Model Foundation, Krista Bard, and others for support of FPRI’s Eurasia Program.