Sydney entered Harvard's doctoral program in Slavic languages and literatures in the fall of 2022 after receiving a master's degree from the Davis Center's REECA program. Her research interests include the politics of historical memory, film and literature of the Second World War, and language policy in the former Soviet Union.
She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2017 with a degree in Russian. As a Boren Scholarship recipient, she studied at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from 2017–2018.
