Congratulations to Serguei Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, for receiving the 2025 Graduate Mentoring Award. Co-sponsored by the Graduate School and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, this honor is awarded to Princeton faculty members who serve as exemplary mentors in nurturing the potential of their graduate students as scholars, teachers and people. Each year, one faculty member from each of the university's four academic divisions — engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities — is selected to receive this honor.

Professor Oushakine serves as the acting chair of the Department of Anthropology and the director of the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. 

Graduate students remarked, “Dr. Oushakine, both in and out of the seminar room, brings levity, curiosity, and genuine joy to his work that can only be described as infectious." Regarded as “an essential presence in the anthropology department,” Oushakine is known for guiding students, even those he doesn’t directly advise, in selecting courses that support their academic and personal growth. "Of course, he picks combinations that one initially deems irreconcilable, undoable, and beyond reach. However, he is unfailingly right in encouraging us to try them anyway,” one student reflected.

Students at all stages of their graduate studies noted his profound influence in changing their scholarly trajectories for the better. “He is a masterful facilitator of seminars, careful asker of questions, and willing beyond any other educator I have had to push and guide his students to think beyond, against and through their own subjectivities,” shared one first-year anthropology student.

Echoing this sentiment, another said: “When reflecting critically on my own work and positionality, I have frequently found myself asking, ‘What would Serguei say?’”

Recipients of the Graduate Mentoring Award will be recognized during the Graduate School’s Hooding Ceremony at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, May 26.