FPRI Announces 2020 Fellows

February 7, 2020

The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is pleased to announce the appointment of its 2020 fellows.

Eurasia Program

Senior Fellows

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a Eurasia Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Professor of National Security Affairs, holding the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in Economic Geography and National Security at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He was formerly the Editor of The National Interest magazine and a Senior Fellow at The Nixon Center in Washington, D.C. Gvosdev received his doctorate from St Antony’s College, Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. A frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs, his work has appeared in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Orbis, and he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BBC. He is the co-author of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower, and the co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests.

Col. Barbara Fick is Director of the Americas Program and Faculty Instructor at the Department of National Security at the U.S. Army War College. She has served as the Political-Military Affairs Chief at the U.S. South Command, and as Defense Attache at the U.S. Department of Defense. She has also served as a Strategic Analyst for the ISAF Commanders Initiative Group. Col. Fick holds a PhD in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures and MA in Spanish Language and Literatures from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Black Sea Fellows

Col. (Ret) Robert E. Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the U.S. Army War College and a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as a Eurasian Foreign Area Officer, he served overseas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Qatar, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Pakistan and Kuwait. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. He is a graduate of the German Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy, a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from the University of Virginia.

Baltic Sea Fellows

Indra Ekmanis is a Baltic Sea Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Associate Editor for Global Nation at PRI’s The World. She has a PhD in international studies from the University of Washington. She was a research scholar at the Wilson Center in 2017-2018 and a Fulbright researcher in Latvia in 2016-2017. Her work concentrates on social integration and civil society in the post-Soviet space and immigration in the U.S.

Una Bergmane is a Baltic Sea Fellow in the FPRI Eurasia Program and a Teaching Fellow at the London School of Economics. She holds a Ph.D. from Sciences Po Paris. She was a 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the Soviet disintegration and the end of the Cold War, Russian-Baltic relations, and contemporary politics of Latvia.

Linas Kojala is Director of the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, a think tank in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Lecturer at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University. He is currently serving as a research fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

Central Asia Fellow

Maximilian Hess is a Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the Head of Political Risk Analysis and Consulting at AKE International in London, where he also heads the Europe and Eurasia desks. He is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College and SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the relationship between trade, debt, international relations and foreign policy, as well the overlap between political and economic networks.

At the end of 2019 our team of affiliated scholars was joined by Miro Popkhadze and by Fabrice Deprez. We are also proud to announce that we have appointed our Baltic Sea Fellow, Indra Ekmanis, as the new editor of FPRI’s Baltic Bulletin.

Middle East Program

Robert A. Fox Fellow

Afshon Ostovar is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in FPRI’s Middle East Program. He is the Associate Chair for Research and an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He was formerly a Research Scientist in the Center for Strategic Studies at CNA, a not-for-profit research organization in the Washington D.C. area. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and has taught at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Ostovar’s research focuses on conflict, strategy, and security issues in the Middle East, with a focus on Iran and its regional allies. His award-winning book, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Oxford University Press, 2016), explores the rise of Iran’s most powerful armed force—the IRGC—and its role in politics, strategic decision making, and as a military actor in the Syria and Iraq conflicts.

Education Program

History Education Fellows

Marissa Friedman is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, in the Education, Culture, and Society program. Her studies focus on the history of education, with a focus on the history of American history textbooks and competing narratives about the Civil War. Before entering graduate school, Ms. Friedman worked for four years at Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, directing the creation, revision, and implementation of history curriculum in world and U.S. history for the network’s 15 middle schools. She also led the public release of this curriculum on Success Academy’s Education Institute website, where educators from around the world can access the curriculum and supporting e-courses for free. Ms. Friedman has also created and led teacher and leader trainings in history curricula for stakeholders within and outside the Success Academy charter network, and she has designed professional development e-courses for history teachers. She currently writes elementary school history curriculum for the Lavinia Group.

Tom Mueller is a Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at the California University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1999. He co-created and is the advisor for the Geography Major with a concentration in Geographic Information Technology. His interests include Geographic Information Systems (Computer Mapping), geography education, and world regional geography. He is especially interested in applying spatial theory to the real world with the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Maurice P. Rapp is a History and Government Instructor at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, DE. He is also a doctoral student in Diplomatic History at Lehigh University, where his research focuses on Atlantic World imperial history and native-imperial relations. He has taught at both the secondary and post-secondary level. He is interested in curriculum design with emphasis on historical inquiry, memory, and historiography.

Brandon Kinney is a PhD Candidate in diplomatic history at Temple University, where his research interests include Cold War relations between West Germany and the United States. He received his Bachelor’s in History and Secondary Education at Shippensburg University and taught American history in public schools for two years before receiving his Master’s Degree in History at Villanova University. While at Villanova, he served as an intern at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, focusing on history education. He is the 2019-2020 recipient of the Thomas Davis Fellowship in Diplomacy and Foreign Relations at the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University.

Templeton Fellows

Aya Marczyk is the Director of Education and Templeton Education Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Her current research explores inquiry-based learning in high school history classrooms. She collaborates with teachers, school districts, and historians to develop and test curricular materials that invite students to engage in critical analysis of historical arguments and evidence. Prior to joining FPRI, she taught interdisciplinary history courses at Penn, at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Jagiellonian University, and at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland. She is a recipient of two student-nominated teaching awards and has collaborated with the Penn Center for Teaching and Learning to design and implement pedagogical trainings for graduate students. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, among others. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Master of Science in experimental cognitive psychology from Bucknell University, and a PhD in European intellectual history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dana Devon a Templeton Education Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, enjoys a wealth of experience in educational programming: she was Vice President of Education Programs for the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, Director of Educational Programming for the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, and Director of Web Educational Programs for the National Constitution Center. She has taught law at St. Joseph’s University and was a practicing lawyer. She currently assists the Museum of the American Revolution.

Ronald J. Granieri is a Templeton Fellow, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West, and Host of Geopolitics with Granieri at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a specialist in Contemporary German and International History with degrees from both Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of a Federal Chancellor Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and is a member in the American Council on Germany’s Young Leader Program. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Syracuse University, Furman University, and the University of Tubingen. He is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), and is currently completing a book entitled: The Fall and Rise of German Christian Democracy, From Detente to Reunification, for Oxford University Press.

Dominic Tierney is a Templeton Fellow with the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He received his Ph.D. in international politics from Oxford University, and has held fellowships at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, the Olin Institute at Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), with Dominic Johnson, which won the International Studies Association award for the best book published in 2006, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America (Duke University Press, 2007), and How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Little, Brown and Co., 2010). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, International Security, and Orbis, among other outlets. He blogs regularly at The Atlantic.