Undergraduate Research

While studying at the University of Richmond, I have undertaken two history research projects under the guidance of my faculty advisor, Dr. David Brandenberger. For each project, I was awarded a University of Richmond Summer Fellowship to support my research in the summers of 2022 and 2023.

Senior Honors Thesis: “Beyond the Gilded Cage: American Journalists Navigating the Soviet Union, 1980-1991”

For my honors thesis, I researched the lives and coverage of four American print journalists in the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s. These journalists reported on the Soviet Union for The New York Times, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and the Associated Press. Although the articles of these journalists guide much of my research, I also incorporated their memories of their reporting in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, I conducted oral history interviews with the journalists as a primary source base for my project. Together, the chapters of my thesis illuminate how the legacy of state control and censorship persisted, shaping the experiences and reportage of American journalists stationed in the Soviet Union until its demise. Despite the gradual loosening of restrictions and the emergence of glasnost, journalists continued to navigate a terrain marked by surveillance and constraints.

“If Truth Be Told: An Application of Contemporaneous Journalistic Ethics to the Western Media’s Coverage of the Soviet Union, 1931-1933”

In this study, I explored the challenges faced by Western correspondents reporting in the Soviet Union, including Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, between 1931 and 1933. Against the backdrop of strict Soviet controls, I considered the systemic reasons that led to the overall failure of the cohort to report the truth and meet the journalistic ethical standards of their time. I analyzed early 20th century articles and books that discuss journalistic ethics in order to establish these reporting standards. Then, I looked at the published articles of seven journalists and considered the quality of their work in the context of the contemporaneous standards. I argue that as a whole these journalists failed to convey accurately the effects of Stalin’s first five year plan on the Soviet people and the Holodomor, a man-made famine designed to suppress the resistance of the peasantry that ultimately killed millions in Ukraine. Despite this overall failure, journalists Gareth Jones and Rhea Clyman emerged as outliers. Rather than accepting the conditions of Soviet oversight and censorship, they both found ways to expose the truth of the Holodomor, while the rest of Western media ignored or discredited it. I presented this project at the University of Richmond Arts and Sciences Student Symposium in April 2023.