The Kennan Institute Digital Fellowship 2026-2027

In the late stages of the Cold War and in the period following its conclusion, the United States and Russia drew closer in the areas of research, academic inquiry and scientific exchange. Indeed, scientific exchange played an important role in expediting a formal end to the conflict. In the 1990s and thereafter, enormous numbers of students, writers, and scholars traveled from Russia to the United States and from the United States to Russia. Archives, libraries and laboratories became places of meeting and cooperation. This dynamic shifted moderately after 2014 and dramatically after 2022. A remarkable number of doors began to close, as geopolitical tension extended from the battlefield into almost every aspect of life. The current reality is that most scholars, practitioners, and graduate students cannot cross the new iron curtain, which, if anything, is less porous than its predecessor. The costs of isolation in the academic and intellectual spheres are already high. Increasingly they amount to a willed mutual misunderstanding. These costs should not be accepted passively. They demand a response that can adapt to the rapidly evolving challenges of the post-2022 era. 

The Kennan Institute Digital Fellowship program is a response to this period in time. It is meant to promote scholarship and writing about Russia by granting fellowships to ten outstanding figures from academia, journalism, and the expert community. It will give these fellows six months of financial support, integrate them into a network and train them in communicating their ideas to the public and to the policy community in Washington, DC. This program will establish a cohort from the United States and from outside the United States, including Russians living abroad. These fellows, upon completion of their fellowship, will be bound into an alumni network. This program is meant to breathe new life into something that twenty years ago might have been taken for granted: academic and scientific exchange between Russia and the United States.

It will begin with evaluation of applications by a selection committee. Ten fellows will be selected for a six-month fellowship, beginning in late October 2026 and concluding in March 2027. Fellows will meet virtually once monthly, and in the course of their fellowship they will be required to publish a piece for the general public and policy community, working with Kennan Institute staff to develop and edit ideas. Kennan staff will do their utmost to meet the fellows’ needs during the research process, from making professional connections to providing access to the library collection. Each fellow’s resulting piece will be published on the Kennan Institute website and projected out on social media.