Sultan Yertay, PhD (2018) is Deputy General Director and Lead Researcher of the M. O. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art of the Committee of Science of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. He is currently doing a scientific internship within the framework of the Bolashak Program at IERES of the George Washington University. He graduated with a BA in Kazakh from Al-Farabi University, where he went on to receive his MA in Literature, and a joint PhD in Literary Studies between Al-Farabi and the M. O. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art, focusing on the Integration of Science and Education. In 2018 he defended his dissertation on “The Transformation of the Modern Novel,” based on a comparative analysis of modern English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Kazakh novels. He is the winner of the scholarship of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan for gifted young scientists (2018), scholarship holder of the international Bolashak Program (2021).

Research areas: Genre transformation of the modern novel, mathematical modeling of the hybrid novel chronotope, genre modification of modern journalism, date journalism, new trends and directions in international journalism

Furkat Sharipov received his Master’s degree in International Education at the University of Exeter (UK), funded by the British government’s Chevening Scholarship. He works as an English teacher at Jizzakh State Pedagogical Institute in Uzbekistan. He has come to IERES to do research on his project, “Student activism: problem or opportunity for the government and higher education institutions in Uzbekistan.”

Research areas: Higher education decision-making in Uzbekistan and the role of students in it, the perception of the student body in state policy discourse, and potential benefits of student participation in higher education decision-making in Uzbekistan

Frank Maracchione is a PhD researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Sheffield. He is the recipient of an ESRC White Rose Pathway Award and co-convener of SPERI’s Doctoral Researchers Network. At the moment, he is spending some time in Washington DC as a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and as a research assistant at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs. He holds an MA in Social Research from the University of Sheffield, an MA in International Relations from the University of Bologna, and a BA in China Studies from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He was also a visiting research student at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, where he conducted research on Chinese counterterrorism

Research areas: China’s normative power, foreign policy, foreign aid and investment (particularly in Central Asia), Central Asian politics and international relations, mixed-methods research and quantitative text analysis

Aurélie Biard, Ph.D. – Postdoctoral Fellow at the Central Asia Program (2015-2016). Aurélie studies the transformation of the state and the reconfiguration of political legitimacies with the emergence of alternative Islamic ethical systems that reject globalization because of its perceived roots in the West (the United States and Europe). The analysis focuses on the Muslim regions of the post-Soviet realm (Central Asia and Russia). Aurélie is in charge, as part of the CERIA (Central Eurasia-Religion in International Affairs Initiative at George Washington, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation) of the research axis “‘Bourgeois’ Islam, Prosperity Theology and Ethics in Muslim Eurasia.” Aurélie teaches a class on “Islam and Ethnicity in Central Asia” at the Elliott School of International Affairs. Aurélie holds a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po Paris, and her work can be found at https://gwu.academia.edu/AurélieBiard