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First recipients of DH Graduate Certificate reflect on research, post-Princeton careers

As we closed this academic year and recognized the Class of 2024, The Center for Digital Humanities had a new reason to celebrate: two recent Princeton PhDs, Gian Duri Rominger *23 (East Asian Studies) and Gyoonho Kong *24 (German), became the first recipients of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities .

Gian Duri Rominger and Gyoonho Kong

Launched in Fall 2023, the Graduate Certificate provides a structured pathway for PhD candidates in the humanities to engage with digital humanities in both theory and practice. Students take two DH-relevant courses, incorporate critical-data and media theories or data-driven methodologies into their dissertation, and present their research at a colloquium series.

“I saw the possibilities of integrating computational and data-driven approaches in my own research and had done related coursework before the certificate was institutionalized,” Rominger explained, “so in that sense it was a lucky coincidence that I managed to earn the certificate.”

After presenting a paper as a first-year PhD student that, as he put it, “rather rudimentarily treated text as data,” Rominger applied for a CDH Graduate Fellowship . He went on to be awarded a Data Fellowship , participate in the “incredibly enriching” NEH-sponsored New Languages for NLP workshop series, and collaborate with former CDH Developer Nick Budak on several projects.

His dissertation, “Aural Texts and the Association of Sound and Meaning in Early China,” incorporated “a text mining approach I designed for ancient Chinese texts.”

“Essentially, I was reapplying data from historical linguistics to the study of early Chinese literature,” he added.

Rominger cited ENG 583 / HUM 587: Literature, Data, and Interpretation , co-taught by CDH Faculty Director Meredith Martin and the late CDH Assistant Director Rebecca Munson, as influential to his research and teaching.

“I learned a lot [in the course], not just about possibilities and limitations of DH, but also about critically interrogating computational and data-driven approaches for socioculturally situated data,” he explained. “Almost all of the content of said course came in handy, including this past quarter, as I was teaching an introductory course on Data Science and the Humanities as part of my current role at the University of Washington in Seattle,” where he is assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature and also teaches in the Data Science minor.

For Kong, who recently defended his dissertation on “Dynamic Movement in Video Games: Space, Time, and Perspective,” the certificate was likewise the culmination of his work in graduate school.

“Throughout my graduate career, I always pursued research interests in the intersection of quantitative and qualitative research methods,” he explained. “After participating in the [CDH] Data Teaching Fellowship twice during my graduate studies, I decided that I wanted to take my shot at the certificate with my dissertation. I thought the certificate will be a great milestone to see how far I have come with my data and quantitative methods.”

Kong’s engagement with DH connects to his future role as data research scientist at the Newark Board of Education, where he will be “supporting and planning the educational policies with data analysis of the district and the city’s student and school data.”

“I think the field of digital humanities strives to make wide impacts with the insights from the study of humanities subjects and data methods, which I am essentially trying to do with my career,” he noted.

What advice would he give to graduate students considering pursuing the DH certificate?

“Be daring! Don’t be afraid of learning new things–quantum physics, music, coding, machine learning, accounting, business, art, whatever it may be. And secondly, don’t worry about whether all these interests will come together to form a nicely 'coherent' career path. If you pursue your learning and research goals with rigor and passion, you will eventually carve out a unique path for yourself.”

Article Cluster Illuminates “The World of Shakespeare and Company”

Karen L. Thornber named next Director of Derek Bok Center

Karen L. Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts, has been appointed the next Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning as of July 1, 2024. 

Recognized by Dean Hopi Hoekstra of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for her great and numerous achievements in both scholarship and mentorship, Prof. Thornber has also served in a variety of leadership roles at Harvard, including as Co-Chair of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Faculty Study Group, tasked in 2020-2021 with charting how to position the FAS for broad-based excellence, innovation, and sustainability, Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center (one of the university’s largest centers), Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Chair of Regional Studies East Asia, and Director of Graduate Studies for both Comparative Literature and Regional Studies East Asia. Prof. Thornber also served as the Interim Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies in the fall of 2020.

Her research and teaching focus on the medical/health humanities, the environmental humanities, gender, empire, inequality, indigeneities, transculturation, and trauma, as these relate to world literatures and the literatures and cultures of East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan), as well as the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean Rim (Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia) and more recently the Pacific Rim. Prof. Thornber earned her A.B. from Princeton, with a major in Comparative Literature and three minors (Japanese Language and Literature, East Asian Studies, and Romance Languages and Literatures); and her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2006, with a specialization in Japanese literature in East Asian and global perspective.

The official announcement from the Derek Bok Center can be found here , and the Harvard Gazette article can be read here .

• Who are the Volga Germans?
• Settlements along the Volga

Mapping information provided by Sandy Payne germansfromrussiasettlementlocations.org

Saratov was home to both a Lutheran parish and a Roman Catholic parish which served the ethnic Germans living in this city.

CONGREGATIONS

St. Clement Catholic Church

St. John Lutheran Church

St. Mary Lutheran Church

The Lutheran parish in Saratov was officially organized in 1793, although Pastor Ahlbaum was active in the city before then.

The Pope established the Diocese of Tiraspol, headquartered in Saratov on 3 July 1848. During its existence, there were five bishops:

Ferdinand Helanus Kahn (1850-1864) Franz Xavier Zottmann  (1872-1888) Anton Johann Zerr  (1889-1902) Eduard von der Ropp (1902-1903) Joseph Aloysius Kessler  (1904-1930)

This diocese went inactive in 1930 with the resignation of Bishop Kessler and officially vacant in 1933 when he died. It was formally "surpressed" in 2002 when the new Diocese of St. Clement in Saratov was established.

The Catholic parishners of Saratov built a wooden church which was consecrated in 1805. This building was used until 1880 when a new brick building was erected. The architect was M. N. Grudistova, and the new building was consecrated to St. Clement (St. Klemens in German) when it was completed in 1881. Today the structure serves as a movie theatre called "Pioneer."

In the post-Soviet era, the St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church was founded in 2001 in Saratov. It is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria (ELCI). There is a chapel in Saratov, and the pastor serving there is Olav Panchu.

There were three frontier garrisons founded to protect merchant ships traveling on the Volga River: Saratov (1584), Samara (1586), and Tsaritsyn (1589). Over the next century, the settlements were rebuilt on first one side of the Volga and then the other following a series of natural disasters.  The 1670 peasant revolt led by Stepan Razin also thwarted development of these cities.

Saratov was the first point of arrival for the German colonists and the location of the Kontora (Office of Immigrant Oversite) following the establishment of the colonies in the 1760's. From its beginning as a provincial outpost, Saratov grew to become a prosperous city and served as the center of industry for the Volga German colonists.

Catholic and Lutheran

Maps of Saratov and Saratov Province

Schnurr, Joseph.  Die Kirchen und das Religiöse Leben der Russlanddeutschen  - Evangelischer Teil (Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 1972): 194.

Saratov  (Wikipedia)

Roman Catholic Diocese of Tiraspol (Wikipedia)

Map of Saratov Province (1823) (World Digital Library)

Historic Saratov photos and maps  (Russian site)

Description of the city of Saratov and Saratov Province  ( Encyclopædia Britannica )

Geographic card depicting key features of Saratov Province (1856)  (World Digital Library)

Five UW–Madison students awarded National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowships

Five UW–Madison graduate students have received dissertation fellowships from the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and Spencer Foundation.

The competitive NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship aims to encourage early-career scholars from a range of disciplines to pursue research that can improve education. Competitive applicants are those who bring fresh, constructive perspectives to the practice of education anywhere in the world. In addition to a stipend, the award supports fellows’ professional development through mentoring at retreats led by senior scholars.

This year, 35 fellowships were awarded , including five UW–Madison awardees:

• Yaa Oparebea Ampofo , Educational Policy Studies
• Ariel Borns , Educational Policy Studies
• Anshu Jain , Educational Policy Studies
• Jonathan Marino , Educational Policy Studies
• Alexandra Pasqualone , Educational Policy Studies and History

Read more about each Spencer Fellow below.

Yaa Oparebea Ampofo

Against the backdrop of climate change and environmental degradation across Africa, and as a community-engaged scholar, Yaa Oparebea’s research journey is enhanced by her own hopes and anxieties about the future. Her dissertation, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Zeit Stiftung Bucerius, explores how Ghanaian youth learn about, experience, and make sense of climate change and other socio-ecological disruptions to their routines and livelihoods. This research also examines how different learning frameworks, environments, and pathways attend to human-planetary health and wellbeing, with a focus on examining their capacities to capture the broad public imagination and influence public policy.

To examine these topics, Yaa Oparebea conducted six months of community mappings and institutional ethnography and 12 months of extensive interviews, participant-observations, and focus group discussions with focal youth participants to look at three major themes: first, how core institutions associated with youth education – such as family, schools, religious institutions, and workplaces – socialize young people about crisis, socio-ecological change, and human-planetary wellbeing; second, how youth make sense of and respond to these efforts in relation to their daily experiences; and third, how youth generate knowledges and actions that may offer new hope to their survival and thriving.

“A study of how youth learn across diverse institutionalized spaces offers a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of knowledge production, teaching, and learning, and new ways of understanding sense-making, experience, and action,” Yaa Oparebea said. “This project challenges pervasive colonialist approaches that overdetermine the importance of formal schooling and overlook youth’s agency in knowledge generation. It informs how we might imagine radically different and decolonizing educational pathways to support youth in generating alternative, hopeful livelihoods and futures, for themselves and the planet.”

Yaa Oparebea’s goal is that such research may deepen our understanding of how various crises are shaping and transforming the work of educators, as well as how we create opportunities for new and powerful educational approaches to realizing sustainable human and planetary wellbeing. Her work speaks to how we might reimagine the educational programs, pedagogies, and policies that support African youth as they situate their needs, responsibilities, and future livelihoods in response to the rapid socio-ecological changes that are reshaping life across the continent and the world.

Ariel Borns

Ariel’s dissertation research explores the interplay of equity-oriented educational reforms around language and literacy in schools serving multilingual students in Indigenous communities in Guatemala. She has conducted qualitative research on projects affiliated with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, including one that has examined how literacy coaches adapt to a school district’s K-5 literacy reforms. In other work, Ariel has examined migrant and refugee youth’s experiences of belonging and activism in a community-based organization as they contend with the intersecting challenges of racialized immigration and education policies in the U.S.

Her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and the Arvil S. Barr Graduate Fellowship from the UW–Madison School of Education. At UW–Madison, she works with the Qualitative Research Methods Group and International and Comparative Education Research Group. She holds a master’s in Educational Policy Studies from University of Wisconsin–Madison, a master’s in Teaching from Clark University, and a bachelor’s degree in International Development and Social Change and Spanish from Clark University. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ariel was a public school teacher in the U.S.

Ariel’s dissertation examines Guatemala’s national coaching reform, which aims to achieve equity through decentralized efforts to support high-quality instruction as well as linguistically and culturally relevant education for Indigenous populations, who comprise over 50% of the national population.

“Coaching is heralded as solving a host of issues, including weak leadership and ineffective literacy instruction,” Ariel said. “Despite the popularity of coaching reforms for improving teachers’ classroom practices and student reading achievement in the U.S. and in low- and middle-income countries, resources and systems to support such organizational improvements are often lacking, even after successful pilot programs.”

Ariel’s work draws on over 600 hours of observations at public primary schools in Indigenous communities and staff professional development, document analysis, and over 50 interviews with educators and key-informants involved in Guatemala’s coaching system to examine how Indigenous peoples embedded within the state as educational leaders understand, negotiate, and challenge international- and state-driven narratives around language, literacy, quality, and equity. Findings from her research reveal the ways the coaching model sought to improve instruction across three interrelated components of the education system – systemic change, pedagogical improvement, and ethnolinguistic inequality. The findings of this study have the potential to inform efforts to leverage coaching to achieve ethnolinguistic and educational equity in diverse contexts around the globe.

“I hope my research generates insights regarding the potentials, challenges, and unintended effects of educational policies, such as instructional coaching, in ways that promise to improve linguistically and culturally relevant literacy instruction in Guatemala and other low- and middle-income countries,” Ariel said.

Anshu grew up in a non-metropolitan city in north India, and later spent most of his youth in New Delhi, where he first experienced life as a transgender man. Prior to joining UW–Madison, he obtained a master’s degree in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and worked in three educational and gender/sexuality rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in north India. During the third year of his PhD, he also completed a master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies at UW–Madison. Through his work, he seeks to learn from and contribute to transgender support networks, movements, and politics in India. As a teacher, scholar, activist, and writer, his goal is to work towards expanding educational rights, policies, and practices in India to make them relevant for trans individuals and to write about how trans people in India survive and thrive.

Jonathan Marino

Jonathan’s dissertation, funded by Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, explores the spread of large-scale early grade reading interventions across many developing countries in recent years. Focusing on the case of Uganda, Jonathan traces the emergence of new early grade reading curricula, pedagogies, assessments, and teacher trainings that have been rolled out countrywide in the past decade. Utilizing participant observation in four focal primary schools, interviews with teachers and policymakers, analysis of documents, and a teacher survey, Jonathan seeks to understand the frictions that emerge when implementing standardized reading curricula across diverse linguistic and regional contexts.

“My hope for the dissertation is that it improves our understanding of reading and reading pedagogies in highly multilingual settings and offers recommendations to an early grade reading field that is growing at a rapid pace,” Jonathan said. “More generally, as a researcher, practitioner, and advocate, I hope to participate in movements for educational justice that center the concerns of our youngest learners and enhance the working conditions and well-being of their teachers and caregivers.”

Alexandra Pasqualone

During her time at UW, Pasqualone has served as a project assistant (PA) at the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT) and a teaching and research assistant to several EPS professors. Currently she is supporting research on UW’s history of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as a PA for the Center for Campus History (CCH). She also co-founded and co-leads the History of Education Graduate Students (HEGS) organization.

Beyond her involvement on campus, Alexandra has spent the last several years studying Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) regions and languages through coursework, a 2019 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) in Meknes, Morocco, a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship in 2020-2021, and a CLS Refresh course in Spring 2022. Pasqualone has volunteered as co-facilitator of a bilingual course on Palestinian Apartheid through the Yallah Al-Quds Program and will intern this summer with the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC), supporting work related to federal recognition of a Middle East and North Africa (MENA) category.

Alexandra’s dissertation explores the relationship between public schooling and identity formation among youths of Arab descent in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1948 to 2001. This period stretches from the heightened immigration of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) populations to the Midwest following the establishment of Israel to the rise in Islamophobia after 9/11.

“Among a highly concentrated community of Arab immigrants, Dearborn’s youth formed diverse understandings of what it meant to be Arab, what it meant to be American of Arab descent, and how to contend with these identities,” Alexandra said. “This intertwined process of identity formation and racial formation was complex as youth of Arab descent simultaneously asserted their own conceptions of their identities and responded to non-Arabs’ often racist and inaccurate perceptions regarding SWANA populations.”

Grounded in archival sources and oral interviews, Alexandra’s dissertation explores the nuances surrounding the identities of Arab populations in the U.S. and complicates current historical understandings of education and its relationship to race, ethnicity, and what it means to be American.

As a researcher, Pasqualone’s interests center around the power of student voice and youth activism, the history of adolescent educational experiences, and the relationship between schools and themes of race, equity, and identity. She hopes her work on Arab American youth will not only bridge the fields of educational history and Arab American studies, but that it will underscore the distinct experiences and identities of youth of Arab descent as they navigated public schools. More broadly, her research and use of oral history aims to apply student-centered approaches to historical research illuminating the importance of youth as historical actors and pointing to history as a valuable tool for approaching contemporary questions regarding the impact of schools on the identities and experiences of the students they serve.

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Five doctoral students awarded Contemporary History Institute fellowships

Five graduate students are the 2024–25 recipients of the  Contemporary History Institute's Klinder Fellowships and the Baker Peace Fellowships.

All five are Ph.D. candidates, which means they have completed all the required coursework and have successfully passed their qualifying exams. The award provides fellows with a stipend to facilitate dissertation completion or research.

"Some students use these fellowships to visit archives or libraries for further dissertation research. Other students use the funding to attend and present their research at academic conferences," said Dr.  Alec Holcombe , associate professor of history and director of the Contemporary History Institute (CHI).

Harrison Fender and  Sukyoung Hong are the 2024-25 Klinder Fellows. The Klinder endowment was established in the 1990s to fund a dissertation writing year for Ohio University doctoral students enrolled in the  Contemporary History Institute Certificate program .

Cody Billock ,  George Ofori Atta , and  Jordan Zdinak are the 2024–25 Baker fellows. The John and Elizabeth Baker Peace Endowment funds the Baker Peace Fellowship through the Baker Peace Studies program, which was created in the 1980s to support teaching, scholarship and conferences at Ohio University that promote the study of conflict and conflict resolution. The program offers at least one fellowship each year to a CHI certificate student.

About the Fellowship Awardees:

Cody Billock

Billock’s dissertation, titled “Huế & the Global Vietnamese Civil War, 1945-1975”, examines a thirty-year period when a violent Civil War consumed Vietnamese society. Based on archival research in Vietnamese, French, and American archives, his project employs Huế City in Central Vietnam as a case study to explore the fractured nature of Vietnamese politics.

“At this time, various Nationalist Parties battled not only with the Communist Party but with each other for control of Huế city,” said Billock, who studies Vietnamese history under the advisement of Holcombe. “Sectarian religious strife between Catholics and Buddhists further contributed to the unrest. This civil war was grafted onto the broader Cold War struggle between the Communist and Capitalist blocs, which further facilitated domestic political violence in Vietnam.”

Billock, who earned his Master of Arts in History from San Diego State in 2020, said that during his Fellowship year he plans to continue his research at the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gerald Ford Presidential Archives in the United States. He also also plans to visit the Thua Thien Provincial archive in Vietnam.

Harrison Fender

Fender’s dissertation, “The Maritime Strategy Ashore: Amphibious Operations, Intelligence, and the Security of NATO’s Littoral,” discusses the use of British and American amphibious operations along NATO’s Northern Flank during the final years of the Cold War. British and American amphibious forces had been vital in protecting Western interests during the first decades of the Cold War. But by the beginning of the 1970s, her argues, economic stagnation and a shift from global commitments had weakened British and American amphibious capabilities. British and American amphibious forces found a new role in NATO planning, particularly defending NATO’s flanks. Intelligence assessments revealed NATO’s flanks had become vulnerable to Soviet naval, amphibious, and airborne forces. Overall, the use of amphibious forces in offensive and defensive roles helped demonstrate NATO’s resolve in checking Soviet ambitions in Europe.

“I plan on using the Klinder Fellowship to finish my dissertation,” Fender said. :I have recently concluded collecting all my research from British and American archives, and I will spend the next academic year writing my dissertation. My plan is to have the dissertation completed and defended by the Spring of 2025.”

Fender earned a Master of Arts in History from Ohio University in 2019. He studies British imperial and naval history under the direction of Dr.  John Brobst .

Sukyoung Hong

Hong’s dissertation, “Seeing Through Western Eyes: How Racialized Beauty Standards Shaped Lives of Women of Color in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores how beauty standards, established around whiteness, contributed to the exclusion of Asian American women from mainstream American society and how Asian American women appropriated the white beauty ideals to pursue social acceptance in the late twentieth century.

Throughout U.S. history, whiteness was synonymous with Americanness, and the physical characteristics of Asian descendants were often classified as ugly. Hence, the slanted eyes of Asian Americans were targeted as the marker of their allegedly inferior race, and plastic surgeons promoted blepharoplasty as a solution for Asian Americans to erase their racial traits and create more beautiful, Americanized faces. Despite plastic surgeons’ racist rhetoric, Asian American women adopted white American beauty standards as a part of their strategy to prove conformity.

“Throughout the history of Asian American immigration, they were treated as unassimilable aliens who refused to be integrated into the mainstream society,” Hong said. “Additionally, because of a series of armed conflicts between the U.S. and East Asian nations, including the Pacific War during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, Asian Americans were put under suspicion. Thus, their bodily manipulation through blepharoplasty was a tool to demonstrate their willingness for assimilation, prove their loyalty, and display their benignity.”

Hong earned an Master of Arts in History from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea in 2017. She is currently studying American women’s history with Dr.  Katherine Jellison .

George Ofori Atta  

Ofori-Atta’s dissertation – “Modernization, the State, and Disaster in Contemporary Ghana: An Environmental History of Accra c.1860 to the Present” – seeks to examine the devastations caused by flood disasters in 20th century Ghana with a focus on the urban settlements of Accra inhabited mostly by the Ga speaking people. His work lies at the intersection between environmental and social history.

“I argue that from the nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, the persistence of ideas about modernization and urbanization reshaped the understanding of environmental disaster among the Ga people of Accra,” Ofori-Atta said. “The relocation of Ghana’s capital from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877 created diverse forms of social organization and regulations that redefined local understandings of the landscape and environmental disasters. In the decades following Ghana’s independence, new political leaders embraced modernization theories of development without any consideration of indigenous thoughts and settlements located in the fragile environments where the poor lived.”

Ofori-Atta earned a Master of Arts in International Studies from Ohio University's Center for International Studies in 2021. He is currently studying African environmental history with Dr.  Assan Sarr . During the Fellowship year, he to conduct field and archival research to enrich the study and outline all the chapters for his dissertation.

Jordan Zdinak

Zdinak’s dissertation – “Violence and Memory: Lynching in the Midwestern United States” – examines the historical trajectory of the normalization of violence against Black bodies during the era of slavery, how society tolerated lynching from the 1870s to the 1950s, then discouraged these extrajudicial murders, and now works to memorialize lynching victims. To show society’s shifting views, she focuses on themes such as the changing concepts of Black and white masculinity and femininity, the failure of law enforcement, the restructuring of public narratives about the Black family, and the roles of the media. Her project will contain an international component by explaining how racist ideas formed throughout the Atlantic world, how British colonists brought these notions to the U.S., and how these beliefs migrated to the Midwestern region after emancipation.

“Midwestern racial violence is worth investigating because it is an understudied topic, as most of the historiography focuses on the South and ignores how powerful and widespread ideas of white supremacy were across the United States,” said Zdinak, who also works under the advisement of Jellison. Refuting this misconception is a point she addresses in the dissertation by focusing specifically on case studies of lynching victims that communities have chosen to commemorate in the Midwestern U.S, while also advancing the idea that addressing past wrongs will enable discussions about present issues of violence perpetrated against Black bodies.

“The Baker Fellowship will allow me the time and opportunity to analyze these documents and swiftly write my dissertation,” said Zdinak, who earned her Master of Arts in History from Ohio University in 2020. “I also plan to travel to the Midwestern lynching commemoration sites to familiarize myself with the area’s history and to learn more about the historical marker projects and those who were involved in memorializing these lynching victims.”

Engels, Saratov Oblast, Russia

When the Volga German colonies were founded, Engels was known as Pokrovsk. It was a commercial center located on the left bank of the Volga River across from Saratov.

Pokrovsk was founded in 1747 by ethnic Ukranians, and it is referred to as the Pokrovsk Ukranian Quarter in the 1798 Census of the Volga German colonies.

Over the years, Pokrovsk became the center of much of the German culture on the Volga and was known by the German name of Kasakenstadt. It had a population of 22,000 in 1897.

In 1924, Pokrovsk became the capital of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and in 1931 was renamed in honor of Friedrich Engels. It is still called Engels today.

In 1965, a bridge was constructed across the Volga River to connect Engels to Saratov.

Population:

- Diesendorf, V.F. Die Deutschen Russlands : Siedlungen und Siedlungsgebiete : Lexicon . Moscow, 2006. - The German Settlements in the USSR before 1941 [in Russian]. Moscow, 2002.

- Engels (city) (Wikipedia)

Map showing Engels (1935).

Pokrovsk sawmills in 1928. Photo courtesy of the Deutsches Bundesarchiv.

Bridge over the Volga River between Saratov and Engels. Photo courtesy of Jens Althoff.

Rendering of the Lutheran Church in Pokrovsk. Source: Jorge Bohn.

German Archives Building in Pokrovsk (1928). Source: oldsaratov.ru

Pre-Volga Origin

Settlers came from the following locations.