History Doctoral Student Wins National Fellowship to Russia

The department of history is pleased to announce that doctoral candidate Yulia Uryadova has won a 2010 Title VIII Research Scholar Fellowship from the American Councils for International Education, which is funded by the U.S. Department of State (Title VIII) and U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright Hays).

American Councils for International Education distributes aid to graduate and post-graduate researchers in the humanities and social sciences for work in Eurasia. The fellowships are highly competitive. In the most recent competition over 80 percent of applicants were turned down.

Uryadova serves as an instructor in the department of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences while completing work on her dissertation in Middle East and Russian history. Her supervisors are professors Joel Gordon and Trish Starks. She will use the grant to support research in Russia for her dissertation, “At the Crossroads of Revolution: The Fergana Valley and the Russian and Iranian Constitutional Revolutions, 1900-1914.”

In the dissertation, Uryadova tackles the complex subject of the impact of modernization, westernization, liberalism, and constitutionalism, mediated through Russian and Persia, on the formation of political systems in Central Asia, specifically the region of the Fergana Valley. Uryadova is currently in Russia, mining the archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and she will soon travel to Uzbekistan to work in Tashkent and Andijan. Because the Uzbeks have closed their national libraries to non-citizens, Uryadova's dissertation will prove to be a very important one in the fields of Modern Middle Eastern and Central Asian History precisely because it will be based on access to materials that Western scholars have insufficiently explored.

Uryadova adds the fellowship to her growing list of awards including the Fulbright College Dissertation Prize and the Jesse Taylor Jr. Endowed Scholarship from the department of history.