The Regional Studies Center (RSC) is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Mikayel Zolyan as a new staff analyst. Dr. Zolyan holds extensive academic and professional experience and is a recognized expert on the issues of ethnic conflict and the politics of nationalism and ethnicity, as well as democratization and nation-building in the post-Soviet context.
.Dr. Mikayel Zolyan is an Analyst with the RSC, specializing in ethnic conflict, politics of nationalism and ethnicity, as well as issues of democratization and nation-building in the post-Soviet context. Zolyan holds a Ph.D. in history from the YerevanStateUniversity and an MA in Nationalism Studies from the CentralEuropeanUniversity in Budapest. Dr. Zolyan currently serves as an Assistant Professor at the BrusovYerevanStateLinguisticUniversity’s UNESCO Chair of Democracy, and was previously a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Russian-ArmenianStateUniversity in Yerevan.
He was also a Visiting Scholar at both the Institute of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (February-June 2010) and at the University of California Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Department of Sociology (January-May 2008), as well as a Visiting Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (TEMPUS Individual Mobility grant; 2004).
Dr. Zolyan is a prominent expert on democratization within the former Soviet Union and is recognized as a specialist on the use of social media tools for civic activism. Since 2010, he has worked as a Project Coordinator and Analyst at the Yerevan Press Club, and has published over two dozen articles and book chapters in Armenia and abroad. A native Armenian language speaker, he is also fluent in both English and Russian, and is an intermediate speaker of Spanish and French.