The Melikian Center serves as a meeting point for dialogue and learning among different communities.
Beyond its core staff, The Center has over eighty affiliates engaged in teaching and research on the region, including current ASU faculty and staff as well as emeriti and graduate student affiliates.
The Critical Languages Institute is made possible by the commitment and expertise of the CLI faculty, many of whom hold appointments at other institutions. As well as financial support, the Center’s Advisory Board provides expertise and ideas on strategic planning, board development, and communications.
Staff
Faculty Affiliates
Fac Aff Emeriti
Affiliates - Cmty
 Cagri Bagcioglu, EdD, serves as Head, Eastern Europe & Central Asia, with Cintana, which was founded at ASU to enable universities around the world to increase their quality and scale, connecting more students to the education they need and deserve. Dr. Bagcioglu has spent his career in international education and has served as Senior International Officer for various U.S. state universities. He worked for Laureate International Universities between 2009 and 2018 in different capacities and roles, becoming the CEO of Laureate’s Turkey operations. During his tenure in Turkey, Dr. Bagcioglu also led Istanbul Bilgi University. He earned his MBA in Marketing and Finance at the University of North Alabama and his doctoral degree in Higher Education Leadership from the University of Liverpool.  George F. Huber, JD, serves as the Deputy Director of the Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training (OPDAT) at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Prior to his service with the DOJ, from 2000 to 2008 he served in the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), including as the Deputy Chief of Staff of UNMIK. From 1998 to 2000, Huber served as Case Manager for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He earned his JD from the George Washington University Law School.
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Advisory Board
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 Mary Karapetian Alvord, PhD, is a Psychologist and Director of Alvord, Baker & Associates LLC |
 Stephen K. Batalden, PhD, served as a professor of History at ASU for 40 years and was the
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 Shahin H. Berisha [Executive Committee - Board Secretary], PhD, is a retired Faculty Member of the Math and Science Division of GateWay Community College and an Adjunct Professor with the Melikian Center. He has served as a facilitator for the Center’s projects with and in Kosovo for 20 years. |
 Ronald M. Birks, MSEE, is a senior software engineer and international representative with Honeywell |
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 Keith S. Brown, PhD, is Director of the Melikian Center and Professor in the ASU School of Politics and Global Studies. His research has focused primarily on politics, culture and identity in the Balkans, with a particular emphasis on relations between Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria. |
 Philip M. Carrano, MPA, is Director of Fiscal Business Services for the ASU College of Health Solutions (CHS). He served for over three years as the business operations manager for the Melikian Center before joining CHS. |
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 Victor Friedman [Distinguished honorary member], PhD, is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University. He is president of the U.S. National Committee of the International Association for Southeast European Studies. He is also a member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Albania, the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosova, Matica Srpska, and has been awarded the "1300 Years of Bulgaria" jubilee medal and the Medal of Merit of Macedonia. |
Aleksandra Gruzinska, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor in the ASU School of International Letters and Cultures, where she primarily taught courses on 19th Century French literature. Her research interests also include Nobel Prize Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska and Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Her longtime interest is the exploration of the fate of unaccompanied Polish children in their trajectory of exile, homelessness, repatriation or immigration, from Poland, by way of Spain, to the U.S. during and after WWII. |
 Patience T Huntwork, JD, is a staff attorney at the Arizona Supreme Court. She has served on legal reform projects and as an election observer in Ukraine, and she is a recipient of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America's "Man of the Year" award. |
 Mary "Marcie" J. Hutchinson, MA, was a high school History and Government teacher for over 30 years, primarily in Mesa, AZ, and now serves as Clerk of the Governing Board of Mesa Public Schools. For several years, she served as Director of K-12 Initiatives for the ASU School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and was interim Chief of Party in Prishtina, Kosovo, for the Center’s “Future Voters of Kosovo” project funded by the U.S. State Department. |
 David P. Jankofsky is a regulatory economist with particular specialties in utility regulation, public financial management, tax administration, and economic development. He has consulted and conducted training in 66 countries including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, North Macedonia, and Kosovo, and is currently serving as a regulatory expert for an energy project led by Deloitte Consulting in southern Africa.
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 Michael D. Kennedy [Distinguished honorary member], PhD, serves as a Professor of Sociology and International Public Affairs at Brown University. Throughout his career, he has addressed East European social movements, and systemic change, including work in Poland and Kosovo. |
 Pauline Komnenich, PhD, serves as a Professor and the Director of the Master of Science in Nursing Program in the ASU Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation. Her research training includes inter-professional nursing and healthcare education internationally, specifically in the Balkans, and earlier research using ethnoscience/sociolinguistics methodology examining greeting behavior among Serbians and Montenegrins. |
 Ilene J. Lashinsky, JD, serves as lawyer for the US government, working to promote the integrity and efficiency of the bankruptcy system. Previously, she was a practicing commercial and bankruptcy and as such she served for a year as a resident bankruptcy advisor on a commercial law project in North Macedonia. |
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 Emma O. Melikian has a particular interest in supporting language study as a means to maintain and build peace. Over many years, she has been a supporter of education and the arts in Phoenix and ASU. Emma and her husband Greg were awarded the ASU University Medal of Excellence in 2008 by President Crow for their leadership and civic engagement. |
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 Claire Sechler Merkel currently serves as Senior Director, Arizona Programs for the McCain Institute for International Leadership at ASU. She served as Associate Director in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs for President George H.W. Bush, as a Legislative Assistant to US Senator John McCain and aid to Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe. She was a Regional Director for Eastern and Central Europe at the International Republican Institute, where she worked and traveled in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, North Macedonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. She founded Sechler Merkel International to provide strategic advice to companies and foundations. |
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Grad Student Affiliates
Dilraba Anayatova in Education Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College; research interests include rural education in Central Asia with the focus on rural communities and environmental issues, environmental justice in postcolonial and decolonial context.
Gaukhar Baltabayeva in Political Science at the School of Politics and Global Studies; research interests in comparative politics and international relations, with a specific focus on migration and brain drain issues from Eurasian countries to the West.
Kelly Baur in Applied Linguistics at the Department of English; research interests in language policy and planning as it relates to marginalized and underrepresented languages.
Ketevan Chachkhiani in Educational Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College; research interests in K-12 education with a focus on teacher pre- and in-service education, education decentralization, education financing policies, and the regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Yonca Cubuk Uzundag in Religious Studies at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; research interests in alcohol consumption in relation to memory, place, identity, gender, class, and politics.
Cagla Demirduzen in Political Science at the School of Politics and Global Studies; research interests in elite decision making, role theory, non-Western political leadership and foreign policy, public opinion literature, international relations of the Middle-East and China, and Turkey with its surroundings.
Tanya Dimitrov in Dance in the School of Dance, Music, and Theater and in Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership in the School of Dance, Music, and Theater; research interests in dance, choreography, pedagogy, and Southeast European culture, as well as creative arts administration and cultural preservation.
Taylor Genovese in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at the College of Global Futures; research interests in anthropology of outer space, Russian Cosmism, the Soviet space program, Marxism and technology, multimodal ethnography, critical secular studies, and contemporary engagements with immortality and the cosmos in Russia and the U.S.
Setrag Hovsepian in Educational Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. His research interests include preservation of endangered languages, diaspora studies, refugee education, education in emergency situations, and education in MENA and Armenia.
Djurdja Jovanovic Padejski in Comparative Culture and Language at the School of International Languages and Cultures; research interests in quantitative sociolinguistics, and political and environmental discourse analysis, with a focus on the Western Balkans, Russia, and Eastern Europe.
McKenna Kellar in Environmental Public Policy at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions; research interests in cultural effects on eating habits, food security, food policy, and disaster management.
Arina Melkozernova in Comparative Culture and Language at the School of International Languages and Cultures; research interests in the digital humanities, including the development and implementation of creative solutions for digitizing culturally valuable information to promote the notion of “sovereignty” in relation to digital technologies and infrastructure.
Jadie Minhas in Political Science at the School of Politics and Global Studies; research interests in regime transitions and authoritarianism in the post-Soviet sphere, comparative politics and international relations between Russia and the U.S., and the U.S. and Western Europe's foreign policy in Eastern Europe.
Masha Monakhova in Environmental Social Science at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change; research interests in international economics, international law, and geography, and the geographic area of the Arctic region.
Nathanael Pierce in Philosophy at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; research interests in political philosophy, philosophy of economics, well-being, bioethics, and health-care ethics; assistant at the Central European Cultural Collaborative at ASU.
Scott Prada in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the English Department; research interests in Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension in Second Language Acquisition, learning and preservation of the Languages of Russia, and Ecolinguistics.
Gina Scarpete Walters in Comparative Culture and Language at the School of International Languages and Cultures; research interests in cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics (cross-cultural semantics and lexicology, human body metaphors, emotion metaphors, the universality of metaphors and variation in metaphor both across and within cultures), and also semantic change, etymology, grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and discourse markers.
Liudmila Sharaya in History at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; research interests in migration studies, Russian and Modern European history, history of empires, and memory studies.
Ekaterina Stoliarova in Agribusiness at the W. P. Carey Morrison School of Agribusiness; research interests are devoted to food insecurity, food policies, and food supply chain.
Rebecca Stuch in Innovation in Global Development at the College of Global Futures; research interests focus on helping others to understand the past and future implications of technology on communities and the economic, political, and social development of those communities, as well as to continue to support the usage of technology to assist social-entrepreneurship and organizational development.
Keti Tsotniashvili in Educational Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College; research interests in higher education policy, administration, and quality assurance, as well as the Republic of Georgia and its surroundings.
Adnan Turan in Education Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College; research interests include the comparative assimilation process of migrants, particularly focusing on Kurdish communities in the republics of the former Soviet Union.
Mariia Vitrukh in Educational Policy and Evaluation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher College; research interests in educational policy, as well as Ukraine and its surroundings.
Dina Ziganshina in Biology and Society at the School of Life Sciences; research interests include health disparities, social determinants of health, reproductive health policy, and the medical decision-making process.
CLI Faculty
Albanian - Linda Mëniku, University of Tirana in Albania
Armenian - 1st Year - Gohar Harutyunyan, Yerevan State University in Armenia
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian - Ena Hasečić, Association for Language and Culture Linguists
Hebrew - Alvina Hovhannisyan
Indonesian - Nyoman Riasa, Ngurah Rai University and APBIPA Bali in Denpasar, Indonesia.
Macedonian - Borce Arsov, Institute for Macedonian Language "Krste Misirkov" at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia
Persian - 1st Year - Maryam Sadeghi
Persian - 2nd Year - Jafar, Shokrolah Zadeh
Polish - Agnieszka Mielczarek, University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, Poland
Russian - 1st Year - Elena Doludenko, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Russian - 1st Year - Irina Drigalenko, Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas
Russian - 1st Year - Natalia Khan, Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado
Russian 1st Year - Natalya Khokholova
Russian - 2nd Year - Marina Sari Ad-Din, St. Joseph University of Beirut and Lebanese American University in Lebanon.
Tatar - Alima Salakhutdinova
Turkish - Nilay Sevinc, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Ukrainian - Olena Tanchyk, Donetsk State University of Management in Mariupol, Ukraine,
Uzbek - 1st year - Saodat Adilova, Nizami Tashkent State Pedagogical University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.