Anastasija Mladenovska is a REECA master's student, born and raised in Kumanovo, Macedonia. She graduated from Miami University in May 2026, where she studied Political Science and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REES).
Her undergraduate experience was one of intense exploration across the region. One winter, she lived in Tallinn, Estonia, where she studied Russian and worked with the Embassy of Macedonia. Another took her across Serbia and Montenegro, where she interviewed Russian migrants who had arrived after 2022, speaking with people across different ages, professions, and circumstances to understand who this new population was and how they were making a place for themselves. In another winter, she lived in Yerevan and traveled to Berd, Armenia, studying Russian while working on a project mapping Artsakh refugees and examining how Armenian state policies sought to integrate a newly displaced co-ethnic population.
One of her most cherished undergraduate experiences, however, was traveling to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for a conference on academic freedom, where she met scholars from across the region and was, perhaps equally memorably, taken aback by the extraordinary plov.
At Harvard, she hopes to bring these experiences together while continuing to explore migration, belonging, state-building, and political life across the Balkans and Eurasia.