Sophia’s studies are located at the intersection of cultural theory, security studies, and international law. Her interdisciplinary research explores the history of enemies, power politics, and war in international relations, with a special focus on the Cold War and post-Cold War-order theatre between Eastern and Central Europe and the West. 

In the humanities, her methodologies employ media analysis, sociology, and investigative journalism to understand how contemporary national identities in Eurasia negotiate their socialist past. At conferences like REEES-Northeast and Slavic Bazaar, she has presented on the 1990-era absurdist cartoons of Russian animator Ivan Maximov as well as on the material object in Sergei Eisenstein’s genealogy of cinema. With the help of University Scholars funding, she travelled in June 2023 to Czechia, Slovakia, and Estonia for ethnographic research on how streetskateboarding subcultures interact with surrounding socialist architecture and their local urban planning politics.

In political science and law, Sophia’s research merge geoeconomics and great-power politics. She is particularly interested in IR theory, the legal implications of economic warfare, and what political risk management can look like in a highly interdependent world. With support from UScholars, she spent the summer of 2024 as an intern at Centre Thucydide, a research centre between the Sorbonne-Panthéon Assas Universities in Paris, researching the geoeconomic implications of a seizure of Russian assets and copy-editing a collection in French on the laws of war in Ukraine and Gaza. Her senior thesis focuses on the logics of wartime trade between enemies during the Great War. 

Her extracurricular interests involve rock climbing, biking, theatre arts, and rare books.

• Eurasia Intern at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
• Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society
• Research Assistant at the Wharton School Political Risk & Identity Lab
• PMG Group Lead

My research is focused on the ideological subtext of modernist art, specifically the treatment of the bullfighting motif in the work of Picasso and his contemporaries. I am also broadly interested in semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the support of University Scholars and the History of Art Department, I spent the summer of 2023 in France conducting archival research and site visits in Castre, Nîmes, Montpellier, and Paris. Outside of my research, I enjoy writing art criticism, and my work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Ocula Magazine. As a Peer Mentor Group Leader for the 2024-25 school year, I am happy to serve as a first port of call for current and prospective Scholars.

• Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal
• Los Angeles Review of Books Editorial Intern 
• Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Grantee