Events The Russia-Ukraine War: An Assessment

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

More than 400 alumni and friends joined us for The Russia-Ukraine War: An Assessment, a virtual event presented by Betsy McKay ’83 and Professor Sergey Glebov. Our speakers discussed and assessed the state of the Russia-Ukraine War two years after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Betsy McKay ’83 is a senior writer who covers public health and medicine for The Wall Street Journal. Her stories examine how diseases and public health policies shape and challenge society. She writes about public health institutions, cutting-edge scientific research, and prevention and patient care for heart disease, diabetes, COVID-19, HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases globally. 

Betsy also writes about Russia and the impact of the war in Ukraine. A Russian speaker, she joined The Journal in 1996 in Moscow, where she reported on the post-Soviet transformation. She covered the beverage industry and public health, and served as Atlanta bureau chief for several years before joining The Journal’s health and science bureau in New York.  

Betsy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for coverage of Russia’s financial crisis. She has also won awards for stories on drug-resistant tuberculosis, maternity care in the rural U.S., COVID-19 and other public health issues as well as on Putin's inner circle.

Sergey Glebov is a historian of the Russian Empire/USSR, and received his master's degree in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University in Budapest and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He holds a joint appointment in the history departments of Amherst and Smith Colleges. He is working on a book project exploring Russian and Soviet relations and encounters with China from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. 

His research focuses on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and on ideologies of imperial expansion, Russian nationalism, and Russia's nationalities. Sergey’s research into the history of the Eurasianist movement led him to explore connections between re-imaginings of Russian imperial space and the emerging structuralism in interwar Europe. He is also interested in the history of the Russian Empire in Siberia, the Far East, and North America, particularly in the interactions of native peoples and imperial structures and the history of missionary activities and scholarly exploration. He is a founding editor of Ab Imperio: Studies in New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space.

Michael Kunichika is a professor of Russian at Amherst College. He offers courses in Russian language at all levels, modern Russian literature, culture, and society, and in film and media studies. His research interests and specializations include twentieth-century Russian and Soviet literature, in particular, modernist tendencies; the cultural history and philosophy of archaeology and anthropology; critical theory; and interdisciplinary approaches to Russian and Soviet literary and visual culture.

He works with various colleagues on the Historical Poetics Research Group, initiated by Boris Maslov (Oslo), along with teaching and research, he is currently on the boards of directors of Humanity in Action and Scholars at Risk.