Kate Peisker
Having completed my AB in Government at Harvard (2009), I am looking forward to beginning my graduate studies at Yale. My broad area of focus is modern Eastern Europe. To date, I have concentrated largely on Ukraine, and my senior thesis was a comparative analysis of church-state relations in Russia and Ukraine. At Yale, I am interested in moving beyond Ukraine and looking at Central and Eastern Europe more generally, likely focusing on the area that comprised the Hapsburg Empire. I am principally concerned with questions of national identity and the elements that contributed to building that identity, specifically language and religion. More generally, my interests lie in the social and cultural history of the region. Having spent a total of about two years in Ukraine, Russia, and Poland - for study abroad, research, internships, and work at Ukrainian Catholic University - I have become acquainted with contemporary attitudes towards the past in the region, and I hope to incorporate that into my work as well.
