People at the Mongolian Research Lab
Dr Alevtina Solovyeva
Head of the Centre for Oriental Studies, Director of the Mongolian Research Laboratory
Alevtina Solovyeva specialises in comparative Asian studies, Chinese and Mongolian studies, folkloristics, historical and social anthropology, social sciences.
She obtained her first PhD degree in Asian studies (2016), and the second in Folkloristics (2021). She undertook her postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2022).
She has been conducting her fieldwork research within various projects in Mongolia, China and other regions of Inner, Central and East Asia annually starting from 2006.
Her current topics of research look at the transnational relations of peoples in Central and East Asia, Mongolian peoples’ communities, beliefs and practices, processes and movements in Mongolia, China and Russia, rural and urban cultures, infowars, propagandas and social imagination.
Dr Mari Valdur
Research Fellow (part-time)
Mari is a social anthropologist who defended her PhD thesis Life and Abortion: The Post-Biopolitics of Reproductive Health in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia at the University of Helsinki in 2020. After her doctoral studies she took up a short visiting scholarship at the University of Cambridge; a visiting lectureship at Tallinn University; and a one-year postdoctoral project Gender Affects: Categories, Capitalism, and Ethnography in Mongolia funded by the Estonian Research Council at Tallinn University and the University of Tartu.
Research interests: gender, capitalism, health, kinship, class, Mongolia, Estonia
Ms Yanjinlkham (Yanji) Dashtseren
Assistant
Yanjinlkham Dashtseren is a MA student of Folkloristics and Applied Heritage at the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu. She is interested in the Buriad, a minority ethnic group in Mongolia. Being Buriad herself, her Master's thesis is likely to address the topic of post-memory of forced migration of the Buriad that took place in the early 20th century. She has a Bachelor's degree in computer sciences from the National University of Mongolia (2008), and extensive work experience as an IT coordinator and general manager at international companies.
Dr Tuya Shagdar
Visiting Scholar (Mar 2024-...; remote work)
FORMER EMPLOYEES AND VISITORS
Dr Kenneth Linden
Visiting Scholar (Mar-June 2023; remote work)
Kenneth's research is on Mongolian environmental and animal history, and his PhD dissertation (Indiana University, Bloomington, PhD in Central Eurasian Studies with a History Minor, 2022) was on the socialist transformation of animal and environmental relations through collectivization. Kenneth has published a few articles on this topic, from the history of wolf hunting to a translation of a socialist-era short story about collective herders. During the visiting fellowship he was finishing a history of Mongolian human-animal relations, and working on a conference presentation entitled Humans as Animals and Animals as Humans in the Mongol Empire. He is currently employed at the Administrative Assistant and Advisor for the Rutgers University History Undergraduate program.
Research interests: environment, animals, Mongolia, climate, Inner Asia, nomadism, hunting