Northeastern Europe is currently home to both Uralic (Saami, Finnish, Estonian) and Indo-European languages (Swedish, Latvian, Russian). However, the scholarly consensus is that this linguistic landscape has formed recently, with the various speech communities migrating into the area within the last few thousand years. Since these areas have been populated since the Paleolithic, the question arises as to what populations these migrants replaced, and what was the nature of their interaction. Dr. Anthony Jakob will attempt to answer these questions by analyzing the lexicon of the westernmost Uralic languages. The goal is to identify words which appear to be related across languages but cannot be explained according to established sound laws. These sorts of correspondences may be indicative of borrowing. If the source of a seemingly borrowed word cannot be identified, this invites the hypothesis that the word originated in a donor language that no longer exists – and one that perhaps has no surviving relatives. When analysed through a combination comparative linguistics and linguistic archaeology, such submerged elements may shed light on the populations which were present in northeastern Europe prior to the Uralic expansion.

Anthony Jakob will be a Human Past Junior Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–26.

At SCAS, Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed will complete the monograph Proba: The First Christian Woman Poet. This forthcoming book, to be published in Oxford University Press’ “Women in Antiquity” series, will examine the life, work, socio-cultural context, and literary legacy of Faltonia Betitia Proba, a fourth-century Roman noblewoman and poet who authored one of the earliest Christian epics, Cento Vergilianus de Laudibus Christi.

She will be a Fellow at SCAS during the autumn of 2025.

While at SCAS, Hanna Shevtsova will work on a project that explores Russia’s non-military strategies for creeping seizure of Ukraine's industrial assets long before the full-scale aggression in 2022. Using a historical institutional analysis, she examines the factors that have caused the weak institutional framework in post-Soviet Ukraine, including oligarchic power, long-term rent-seeking and offshoring patterns, and pro-Russian influence agents’ operations. Focusing on the Ukraine’s chemical industry, this project provides new insights into methods of gaining and holding control by Russian businesses and their proxies over Ukraine's key profitable chemical assets and related value chains.

Hanna Shevtsova will spend the autumn semester of 2025 at SCAS as a SCAS-VUIAS Fellow.