Meet the East European Studies teaching staff
Kapitolina Fedorova is the Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Tallinn University. She graduated from St. Petersburg State University (PhD 2002) and used to work for 15 years at the Department of Anthropology at European University at St. Petersburg. Before joining Tallinn University she spent two years teaching at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea.
Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language contacts, border and migration studies, linguistic landscape studies, and interethnic communication. She conducted research projects in different regions, including the Russian-Chinese, Russian-Finnish, and Russian-Estonian border areas, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Seoul.
Piret Viires is the Professor of Estonian Literature and Literary Theory at Tallinn University. She received her doctorate degree in Estonian Literature in 2006 from Tartu University. She has published books on Estonian Literature and postmodernism. The most recently published is Postmodernism in Estonian Literary Culture (2012, Peter Lang Verlag). In addition, she has published many articles, edited scholarly publications, organised conferences. She is a member of various scholarly organisations and editing boards. Her teaching assignments and research have taken her to the University of Turku (Finland), Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary), Ohio State University (USA). Piret Viires is a member of the board of the Estonian Writers' Union and has published fiction.
Main research interests: Modern Estonian Literature, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, relationships between literature and technology, digital literature.
Ksenia Shmydkaya is a Lecturer of Slavic and Russian studies.
She received her PhD from Tallinn University's School in Humanities in 2022. She is currently working on her first monograph exploring the philosophical foundations and political resonance of women-authored historical fiction in interwar Europe. Among her scholarly interests are women's writing, gender history and history of knowledge in Eastern Europe, epistolarity, historical representation, and the French Revolution.
Since 2019, she has been teaching seminars on literature, cultural theory, history, and basic academic skills.
Anna Verschik is the Professor of General Linguistics at Tallinn University. Her scholarly interests include topics like Estonian-Russian language contacts, multilingualism on the internet, sociolinguistics in the Baltic countries, contacts of Yiddish in the Baltic area and sociolinguistic situation of post-Soviet countries in a comparative perspective. She teaches subjects related to her research field.
Main research interests: contact linguistics and multilingualism.
Kristo Nurmis is a historian and a research fellow at the Tallinn University School of Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in the field of Russian and Eastern European History (2022). Kristo is currently working on a book project exploring the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in the Soviet and Nazi occupied Baltic States from 1939-1953.
Tõnis Saarts is the Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Tallinn University. He has a background in both political science and sociology. He has focused on comparative politics, political sociology, and historical sociology. More specifically, his research interests have concentrated primarily on political parties, party systems, social cleavages and the multiple challenges contemporary political parties have in modern democracies (the rise of populism, party system cartelization, etc.). He has also been interested in democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, where he has primarily focused on the Baltic States in a comparative perspective. His great passion has been historical sociology, in which he has studied the formation of modern democracy and statehood from a historical perspective. Saarts has also been active in the public sphere, in which he has written numerous media articles and provided media commentaries on the developments in Estonian politics for many well-known international media outlets.
Natalia TÅ¡uikina is Associate Professor of Russian. She graduated from Saint-Petersburg State University and earned her doctorate degree (candidate of philological sciences) researching the functioning of the semile in a literary text; in 2002 started teaching and research in Tallinn University.
Her research interests include not only different aspects of text analyses, but also trends in the modern Russian language orthography and punctuation. She works on questions of language and culture, language game usage in everyday life. Being a teacher of practical Russian courses, Natalia TÅ¡uikina has paid much attention to the issues of teaching Russian to foreigners and to those who speak Russian as a heritage language.
Anna Fomina is a teacher of Russian. She obtained her bachelor's degree from Herzen University in St. Petersburg. In 2024, Anna obtained a master's degree from the University of Tartu in foreign language teaching, specializing in Russian and English. She also spent a semester at Stockholm University, where she studied linguistics and bilingualism from different perspectives.
Ele Arder is a teacher of Estonian as a second language. At Tallinn University, she works primarily with A1- and A2-level Estonian learners. She enjoys teaching beginners because it allows her to shape students’ first encounters with the language, help them find suitable learning methods, and encourage them to start using the language as early as possible. She sees every moment of language learning as an opportunity to introduce Estonian culture, which helps her build deeper and more trusting connections with her students. Arder believes that university students are very quick learners and that their interest in Estonian language and culture is often greater than Estonians themselves might assume.