- Notes on the Contributors
Liudmila Amiri is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language for the Humanities at Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Her 2007 Candidate’s dissertation was devoted to “Language Play in Russian and American Advertising,” and she is co-author of three monographs and over forty articles on various aspects of language play (especially in word formation, typography, and and intertextuality), the significance of English in Russian advertising, and the role of contemporary social factors in modern language usage in both English and Russian.
Mark Edele is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Stalinist Society 1928–1953 (2011, Oxford University Press) and Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (2008, Oxford University Press). His research concentrates on the history of veterans (both Soviet and comparative), German-Soviet conflict, Stalinism, wartime and post-war Soviet society, war and displacement, and historiography.
George Fowler is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Indiana University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Slavic linguistics, Russian language, and general linguistics. Over the years his research interests have shifted from his original specialization in technical linguistic analysis of Russian and other Slavic languages to more social and humanistic foci, such as the role of English in modern-day Russia and the semiotic analysis of contemporary English-language advertising in the U.S. and abroad. He has long maintained a leadership role in the field of Slavic studies, as director of Slavica Publishers, co-founder of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics and the Slavic Linguistics Society, and as two-time vice president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
Mikhail Ilyin teaches comparative politics at National Research University “Higher School of Economics” and partially lectures at MGIMO. He also serves as a visiting professor at Baltic Federal University (Kantiana). His recent publications in Russian includes: Asymmetries of Global Sovereignty: Zones of Challenged Statehood (Moscow: MGIMO, 2010), co-authored with I. Kudriashova; and Balto-Pontida: Times and Spaces of its Politics (Kaliningrad: Baltic Federal University, 2010), co-authored with E. Meleshkina. His recent publications [End Page 319] in English are: “Political Atlas of the Modern World” (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), with A. Melville, E. Meleshkina et al.; “Abhkazia, South Ossetia and Transdniestria: Secessions in the Post-Soviet Space” in Ashgate Research Companion on Secession, eds. Aleksandar Pavkovic and Peter Radan (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); “Stalinism,” “Statism,” and “Democracy: Russian Perspectives,” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011).
Kitty Lam is a PhD Candidate at Michigan State University’s History Department, specializing in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe, with minor fields in Migration Studies and Empires in World History. She holds a BA in History and an MA in East European and Russian Area Studies from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Kitty Lam’s dissertation, “Shared Space, Varied Lives: Finnish-Russian Interactions in Dacha Country, 1880s– 1920s,” examines the significance of contacts between Finns and Russians which persisted in the Russian summer house settlements in eastern Finland. Her dissertation research is funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Elena Meleshkina is a PhD (candidate of sciences) in political sciences. She researched on party and electoral politics, and state and nation-building. Currently she is the head of the political science department at the Institute of Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is the editor-in-chief of a Russian political science journal Politicheskaia nauka. She also teaches as a part-time lecturer at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and National Research University “Higher School of Economics.” She has published dozen of articles and several books including: Formirovanie novykh gosudarstv v Vostochnoi Evrope [The Formation of New States in Eastern Europe] (Moscow: INION RAN, 2012); Balto-Chernomor’e: Vremena i prostranstva politiki [The Baltic–Black Sea Region: The Times and Spaces of Politics] (Kaliningrad: RGU im. I. Kant, 2010), co-authored with M. V. Il’in; Political Atlas of the Modern World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), with A. Melville, Yu. Polunin, M. Ilyin...