简介

Professor Kaplan has visited the countries of the former Soviet Union over 68 times with research residencies in Russia, Tatarstan, and Estonia. Most recently, she taught a special course on methods and research design at Al Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan (April 2011), and in May 2010 taught a special course on ethnicity at Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Estonia during the fall 2005, spent part of the summers of 2006 and 2008 in Kazan, Tatarstan, and delivered a lecture series on Russian politics in Warsaw, Poland in spring 2007. In 2009, she began research in Kazakhstan as part of a new project on identity that also includes Russia, Tatarstan, and Estonia. She has participated in the International Research and Exchanges Board's scholars programs four times, living in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tallinn (Estonia), Novosibirsk, and Kazan, and has served as the director of the UC-Systemwide Study Center in Moscow. Her survey research in Russia and Estonia has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies. In addition to surveys, her research includes the creation of an event data set based on the coding of the Russian and Estonian language press and a discourse analysis of Estonian and Russian language literary journals. Most recently, she has commissioned in-depth interviews and focus groups on identity in Russia, Tatarstan, Estonia, and Kazakhstan. Professor Kaplan has just completed a book with Henry Brady (UC Berkeley) entitled, Gathering Voices: Political Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), and is the author of The Party and Agricultural Crisis Management in the USSR (Cornell University Press, 1987). Her current research, supported by a Policy Connect Collaborative Grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (2007) and the National Council on Eurasian and Eastern European Research (2009), explores constructivist understandings of ethnic identity through the use of focus groups and surveys. The research compares ethnic identity and its political consequences in Russia, Estonia, Tatarstan, and Kazakhstan.