Graduate Student

Katie Frevert

B.A. Russian and East European Studies and Creative Writing, Oberlin College, 2022

Entered Berkeley program 2023

Paper submitted with Berkeley application: “‘Kill the State in Yourself’: Totalitarianism and the Illiberal Dissidence of Egor Letov”

Languages known and studied: Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Old Church Slavic

Filippo Boscolo Gioachina

B.A. in Language, Civilisation, and the Science of Language: Russian and German Languages and Literatures, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 2021

M.A. in European, American, and Postcolonial Languages and Literatures: Slavic and Balkan Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 2024

Entered Berkeley program: Fall 2024

Paper submitted with application to Berkeley: Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev’s Literary Framework and its Orientalist Implications: Study on Travelogue in the Russian Far East from a Postcolonial Perspective

Languages known and...

Nicole Gonik

B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Political Science, Hunter College, 2023
Entered Berkeley program in 2024

Papers submitted with application: Borders in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and “The Demon” and “Every man must have somewhere to go”: Movement in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

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Nina Gopaldas

B.A. in Comparative Literature, Reed College, 2024
Entered Berkeley program in 2025

Paper submitted with application: “Take a Hundred Lines for the Memory of Those who Lived on Tubabao”: Displacement and Poetic Voice in Olga Skopichenko’s Verse

Languages known and studied: English, Filipino, Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

Research interests: 19th and 20th century poetry; lyric theory; émigré and exile literature; Russian formalism

Zachary Hicks

Bio/CV MA Slavic Languages and Literatures, UC Berkeley, 2019 MA Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 2017 BA Russian & Philosophy (double major), University of Tennessee, 2009 Publications:

“Yuri Rytkheu, Narrative Time, and the Afterlife of Second World Literature.” Comparative Literature. (forthcoming June 2026).

“Memories of Development: Global Media after State Socialism.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 46-68. “The Pot...

Annabel Hou

B.A. in Russian Language & Literature, UC Berkeley, 2025
Entered Berkeley program in 2025

Paper submitted with application to Berkeley: "The Hegelian basis of V. G. Belinskij's aesthetics"

Languages known and studied: Chinese, Russian, Spanish, German

Research interests: 19th-c. Russian intellectual history; romanticism and idealism; Belinskij; Nabokov; history of friendship; relationship between philosophy and literature; influence of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel in Russia

Sabrina Jaszi

B.A. Russian and Comparative Literature, Oberlin College 2007
M.F.A. Creative Writing, University of Florida 2013
M.S. Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015
Entered Berkeley Program 2017

Paper submitted with Berkeley application: “‘Dimitrii Would Kill Dimitrii’”: An Ambivalent Antihero in Sumarokov’s Tragedy”

Languages known and studied: Russian, French, Uzbek

David Kurkovskiy

B.A. Yale University, majors in Russian and Eastern European Studies and Computer Science, 2017.

Yale Parker Huang Fellow and Visiting Student, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2017-8.

Visiting Researcher (Młodzi Naukowcy program), Centre of East European Studies, University of Warsaw, 2018-9.

Entered Berkeley program in 2020

Paper submitted with application to Berkeley: “’Where is Raysn?’: Imagining an Early 20th Century Jewish-Belarusian Shared Neighborhood”

Languages known and studied: Belarusian, French, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, OCS (Reading)

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Sophie Lee

B.A in Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, 2018

Entered Berkeley program in 2019

Paper submitted alongside Berkeley application: “ Trainspotting: teleology, linearity and continuity in the [post] space of Zheleznaia doroga”

Languages known and studied: Russian, German, French, English, Korean, Kazakh