Biography
Eden is a first-year REEES MA student originally from Northern California. She earned her B.A. from the University of Toronto (Canada), and majored in European Affairs and Slavic Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Russian. She has been studying Russian since high school, and began study of Ukrainian at UofT in 2021, which she is continuing at Illinois. Her academic interests lie primarily in Russian-language media, particularly literature, and the relationship between post-Soviet states (especially Ukraine), Russia, and the West. Outside of academia, Eden enjoys traveling, hiking, cycling, reading, and learning new languages.
Research Interests
Portrayal of non-Russian ethnicities and nationalities in Russian-language media
The Caucasus in Russian literary imagination
Fin-du-siècle literature
The integration of post-Soviet states into the EU and NATO
The Cold War in Iceland
Research Description
Eden plans to focus her research on Russian-language media and its effects on the integration of post-Soviet states into the "west."
At the University of Toronto, she worked with Dr. Kate Holland on Digital Dostoevsky, a computational text analysis project on a corpus of 7 works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. More information on the project can be found at https://digitaldostoevsky.com/.
Education
Honours B.A. with High Distinction in European Affairs and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, 2023
Middlebury College School of Russian (summer study at Level 7), 2022