Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 2007-2008

Damon Mayrl, Sociology: The Transformation of Church-State Relations in the United States and Australia, 1900-2000. This project investigates the historical development of church - state relations in the United States and Australia during the twentieth century. Despite their many similarities, the two nations adopted very different approaches toward religious organizations during this period. While the United States moved toward stricter separation of church and state, Australia adopted a set of policies that increased the interconnections between the two. What accounts for the different paths taken by these two nations? Mr. Mayrl aims to explain this divergence by examining the context and development of state policies toward religious organizations in two particular domains: education and social welfare. Through an examination of government documents, commission reports, and archival records, he foregrounds the role that state officials played in these changes. His work demonstrates both the extent to which state officials' attempts to build stronger and more governable states led them to adopt particular positions regarding the appropriate relationship between church and state, as well as how their actions were alternately constrained and enabled by conflict among religious groups. This study challenges theories of secularization that posit that the growth of the state and a rise in religious pluralism must inevitably lead to looser church - state coupling by demonstrating that the growth of states can lead either to more or less interconnection. It also "brings religion back in" to the study of the state, highlighting the role that religious actors and religious conflict have played in the process of state building.

Erik R. Scott, History: The Georgian Diaspora in the Soviet Union. Russians were certainly the predominant ethnic group in the Soviet Union, but Soviet society was characterized by the interaction of diverse ethnic groups drawn from across its vast territory. Migrating to Moscow from the Soviet periphery, these ethnic groups sought out niches and often performed specialized functions, giving the division of labor in Soviet urban society an ethnic dimension in both reality and in popular representations. Perhaps no group of ethnic outsiders was as central to Soviet life as were the Georgians, who at different periods in Soviet history might appear as prominent political figures or leading dissidents, state-sanctioned entertainers or illicit traders. The Georgian diaspora was a small but highly mobile and visible group, whose members had roots in the Georgian Socialist Republic yet traveled throughout the Soviet Union. Mr. Scott seeks to bring the character and practices of this group to light for the first time, looking at those specialized roles in which group members achieved remarkable prominence and examining how these evolving roles reflected broader developments in Soviet history. In so doing, his project will explore the multinational character of Soviet society by rewriting the history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of one of its most conspicuous ethnic minority groups. In order to realize the necessary depth for probing the complexities of the vast time span from 1917 to 1991, his research will focus on the experience of the Georgian diaspora in Moscow. A multinational metropolis, Moscow was at once the seat of Soviet power and the prime destination for the Soviet Union's diverse ethnic groups.

Victoria Smolkin, History: The New Soviet Cosmos: Life-Cycle Rituals, Family Culture, and the Socialist Way of Life (1956-1985). In the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Soviet state set about transforming traditional ritual practices in order to connect personal experience to Marxist-Leninist ideology -- an ideology that claimed to give new meaning to individual, family, and social life. Yet while the Soviet state created secular bureaucracies to perform the rituals that had, until the Russian Revolution, been performed by religious institutions, the state's sporadic early attempts to transform rites of passage -- "octoberings" (christenings), and "red" weddings and funerals -- proved unsuccessful for several decades. Indeed, it was not until November 18, 1964 -- shortly after Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union -- that the RSFSR Council of Ministers issued decree No. 203, which formed the "Committee for the Elaboration of New Civic Rituals and their Incorporation into Daily Life," and mobilized professional and institutional expertise in order to create new "Soviet" rituals. Ms. Smolkin's dissertation is a study of the Soviet state's creation and inculcation of new rituals to observe the most significant rites of passage in human life: birth, marriage, and death. The narrative begins in 1956, when the Soviet state came to see the absence of Soviet rituals as a problem and began to mobilize professionals to create new rituals, and ends in 1985, with the onset of perestroika. Like most Soviet state projects, the project to inculcate Soviet rituals had many objectives, combining practical and ideological goals, and introducing new elements into old ideological formulas. On the one hand, the project was an attempt to re-address long-standing concerns -- ideological, administrative, political, and social. Ritual reform was yet another assault by the atheistic Soviet state on religion and the persistence of religious practices. Moreover, the ethnographic focus of the project and its attempt to create specifically "national" rituals for each Soviet republic again addressed the issue of nationalities through the "folklorization" of ethnic cultures and a pan-Soviet leveling of national differences under a broader Soviet communal identity. In addition, the Soviet project to inculcate new civic rituals sought, yet again, to revitalize Soviet society through ideology. On the other hand, the project to inculcate new rituals was a concerted effort to resolve social issues specific to the postwar period: to establish and codify social and familial relationships, and to stabilize Soviet society after the massive demographic crisis, geographic dislocations, and social upheaval caused by the Second World War. With its focus on strengthening the family (and thereby the polity), the project explicitly articulated the important role new civic rituals were to play in the promulgation of the new Family Code (1969) and the Brezhnev Constitution (1977). By examining the fate of the Soviet project to create and inculcate new rituals, Ms. Smolkin will analyze the new model for family life envisioned by the state during the Brezhnev era, and explore how this new imagined "little" family connects to the state's new vision for the "big" Soviet family -- the model of social relations and communal identity promoted and inculcated throughout the late Soviet period.