Genrietta Churbanova selected as Princeton valedictorian, John Freeman named salutatorian
Genrietta Churbanova, an anthropology major from Little Rock, Arkansas, has been named the Princeton Class of 2024 valedictorian. John Freeman, a classics major from Chicago, has been selected as the salutatorian. The Princeton faculty accepted the nominations of the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing at its April 15 meeting.
Commencement for the class of 2024 will take place at Princeton Stadium on Tuesday, May 28. Churbanova and Freeman are expected to give remarks at the ceremony.
Churbanova is deeply engaged in scholarship related to Chinese and Russian relations. In addition to her anthropology major, she is minoring in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Chinese language and culture. She was named a 2024 Schwarzman Scholar and will pursue a master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing after graduating from Princeton.
Faculty across the Department of Anthropology described Churbanova in a letter of recommendation as a student “beyond compare” and as a “brave, caring and brilliant scholar” and a future leader. “I believe her to be one of the most exceptional and rigorous students we ever had in our department,” wrote Onur Günay, director of undergraduate studies and lecturer in anthropology.
“Genrietta exemplifies the very best of a Princeton education and citizenship,” wrote João Biehl, department chair and the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology. “Conscientious to a fault and deeply ethical, at this very young age Genrietta is producing rigorous, pathbreaking, and public-facing scholarship that will stand the test of time and help to shape critical sensibilities to come.”
Churbanova is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and a two-time recipient of Princeton’s Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence.
Her senior thesis, titled “Taiwan’s Russians,” is an ethnographic study of the experiences of Russian nationals living in Taiwan. Her junior paper examining the impact of state-level policies on the lives of people along the Chinese-Russian border was published in the Intercollegiate U.S.-China Journal.
Churbanova is “a highly original thinker with a unique perception of the world,” said her thesis adviser Serguei Oushakine, professor of anthropology and Slavic languages and literatures.
“One of the most gratifying things about Genrietta’s scholarly work is her ability to bring together various strands, traditions and sensibilities,” Oushakine said. “Her choice of the Russophone community in Taipei is symptomatic of this: to study this community, Genrietta needed to be comfortable enough with conducting interviews in Russian and Chinese and to write about them later in English.”
Churbanova said doing her thesis research in Taiwan last summer was an extraordinary academic and personal experience. “It highlighted one of the many reasons that I love Princeton: at the University, what you learn in the classroom has diverse applications in the wider world, some of which will inevitably take you by surprise.”
The project also exemplified what she loves about the field of anthropology, she said.
“The discipline complements who I am as a person and I greatly appreciate how anthropologists view the world,” she said. “Given that I spent my childhood between Moscow and Little Rock, I was constantly exposed to various narratives about Russia and the United States, the experience of which attuned me to anthropological thinking.”
Churbanova’s scholarship related to China and Russia also includes a summer internship through the University’s International Internship Program with the Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow, and a gap year after high school studying Mandarin in Beijing through the U.S. State Department’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth.
On campus, Churbanova is president of the student Society of Russian Language and Culture. She said some of her favorite times at Princeton have been spent at the Russian language table — open to undergraduate and graduate students of all language levels — in the Mathey College dining hall.
“I look forward to the language table every week, it is like a home away from home,” she said. “I see this language table as a microcosm of Princeton itself: welcoming, warm and intellectually stimulating.”
In addition, Churbanova is a head fellow at the Princeton Writing Center and a Mathey College peer academic adviser. She formerly served as head opinion editor for The Daily Princetonian and as a fellow with the online college advising program Matriculate. [...]
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Info from a follow-up based conversation (not public/published) reaction to a comment by a learned reader of this blog's entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Churbanov
https://en.topwar.ru/34745-princ-dvora-yuriy-churbanov.html
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