Events

Dr. Golfo Alexopoulos is founding Director of the USF Institute for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies and Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies. Her teaching and research focus on Russian/Soviet history and politics, disinformation, and authoritarianism. She is the author or editor of four books, including Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag published by Yale University Press. She received her PhD in Russian/Soviet history from the University of Chicago and has been awarded fellowships from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Her current project “Social Network Websites, Kremlin Propaganda and Internet Usage Patterns among Russians” is being funded by the Minerva Research Initiative.

Evangeline Linkous is Program Director for and an Associate Professor in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of South Florida. She studies the fiscal and legal frameworks used to rationalize management of land resources in areas of growth and change. She is a recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (Tbilisi, Georgia, 2022) and the USF Outstanding Community-Engaged Teaching Award. She currently serves on the Executive Committees for the American Planning Association, Florida Chapter and Mid-Florida Fulbright Chapter. She has previously served as a Planning Commissioner for the Hillsborough County City County Planning Commission. She has a Ph.D. and Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from New College of Florida.

Dr. Suzanne Harris-Brandts is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, and Faculty Associate at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She has also held teaching positions at MIT, the International Black Sea University, and University of Waterloo. Harris-Brandts’ research brings together design and the social sciences to explore issues of power, equity, and collective identity in the built environment, foregrounding the geographies of post-socialist Eurasia. Other areas of her work look at design’s relationship to conflict-induced displacement. Harris-Brandtsholds a PhD in Urban and Regional Studies from MIT and is a licensed architect in Canada.

Joseph Salukvadze is a Professor at the Department of Human Geography, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Tbilisi State University. He served as Vice Rector of Tbilisi State University from 2014-2017. From 2008 to 2016, Dr. Salukvadze was Vice President of the Geographic Society of Georgia. In 1991-1992, he was the Swedish Institute Research Fellow at Stockholm and Lund universities. From 1998-99, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2002 to 2018, he was a Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. As an expert in urban development, Dr. Salukvadze has co-operated with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UN Habitat, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and many other international development agencies. His expertise includes urban studies, housing and land policies, and sustainable mountain development.

Dr. David Sichinava is a human geographer serving as Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He is also a Research Analyst at the US-based Langer Research Associates and former Research Director of the Caucasus Research Resource Center, a Tbilisi-based non-profit focused on social science research and policy analysis. Sichinava’s research focuses on the social, spatial, and temporal aspects of inequality, the politics of urban development and displacement, and the role of civil society in urban policy. He is currently Associate Editor for the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies, published by the University of California Press.