NOTES ON PEOPLE: Awarded Fulbright for research in Ukraine (09/17/06)

NOTES ON PEOPLE

Awarded Fulbright for research in Ukraine

WASHINGTON - Sophia Johnson, a graduate of Smith College has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. student scholarship to Ukraine in Eastern European politics. She is one of over 1,200 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad during the 2006-2007 academic year through the Fulbright Student Program.

A Chicago native, Ms. Johnson attended The Latin School of Chicago and Smith College in Northampton, Mass., graduating in 2003. At Smith College, where she majored in sociology and Russian civilization studies, Ms. Johnson wrote a senior thesis titled "State Formation in Ukraine: Political and Ethno National Dilemmas in Nation-Building." Her forthcoming year of Fulbright sponsored research in Ukraine will examine the causes and catalysts of Ukraine's Orange Revolution of November and December 2004 and analyze what that popular uprising did and did not accomplish.

"My thesis at Smith dealt with Ukraine's historic difficulty implementing an egalitarian political system and obtaining statehood, particularly the significance of national identity in the electoral process. I predicted no conclusion to Ukraine's political struggles and certainly could not have anticipated the massive revolt and appeal for political change that would follow just a few months later," Ms. Johnson explained.

"This opportunity afforded by Fulbright to further examine variables responsible for the Orange Revolution is a wonderful opportunity to elucidate what happened in Ukraine during the winter of 2004 and, specifically, what distinguished this instance of political injustice from those of centuries' past," she added.

Ms. Johnson spent many summers in Ukraine as an adolescent and volunteered as a short-term election observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) during the final round of Ukrainian presidential elections in December 2004. Her monitoring experiences left her with "powerful recollections of witnessing the steadfast determination of a million Ukrainian citizens demanding political change," she stated.

"As a young American, I was shaken and moved by what I witnessed: grass- roots democracy in action with an unprecedented 90 percent voter turnout of apparently all socio economic, religious and age groups, many walking kilometers to vote and give voice to their demand for political change," she noted.

Since graduating from college, Ms. Johnson has worked as a paralegal at two large law firms (Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston and subsequently Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York). She is the daughter of corporate attorney Jaroslawa Zelinsky Johnson, director and managing partner of the Kyiv law office of Chadbourne & Parke, LLP, and Dr. Weldon T. Johnson, formerly sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of Nevada at Reno.

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