“I went into this research with general knowledge of Russian culture and no knowledge at all of its architectural history,” said Andrew McKernan, an Honors Program student from Bow, New Hampshire. “I learned from the ground up about the country’s architectural history and about a side of twentieth-century history that is not usually covered in academic classes.”
The idea for Andrew’s project, funded by the International Research Opportunities Program (IROP) at the University of New Hampshire, was conceived of his sophomore year and refined with the help of his mentor, Dr. Cathy Frierson. “She was amazingly helpful in her commentary of what would be feasible or not,” said Andrew, who will graduate in May 2009 with a dual major in Russian and linguistics. While studying overseas, he found living alone in Moscow to be difficult yet fun at the same time: “I learned a lot about myself and the ways that I can motivate myself to do work when I’m so far away from any kind of a traditional deadline, overseer, or system of accountability. I also learned about making new acquaintances in a different city, and made some unexpected friends with whom I still correspond today.”
Andrew received a Fulbright to return to Moscow for academic year 2009-2010, after which he will begin the Ph.D. program in Russian history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He hopes eventually to become a professor.
Dr. Cathy A. Frierson is a professor in the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire, where she has been teaching for seventeen years. Her research and teaching interest focuses on Russian history. Although she co–founded the International Research Opportunities Program (IROP) in 1997 with Dr. Donna Brown, Dr. Frierson’s first experience as an IROP mentor came in 2008 when she mentored three students, Andrew McKernan being one of them. Andrew’s work with the group Deti Iofana introduced Dr. Frierson to newly emerging aspects of contemporary Russian culture that were previously unknown to her. “This,” she says, “is one of the tangible rewards of directing IROP students who choose to work in Russia, where change is occurring so constantly and rapidly that every possible source of information ‘on the ground’ adds to my understanding of contemporary Russian culture.”
Read Andrew McKernan’s research article Politics and Architecture: At the Crossroads with Young Moscow Architects >>
