Congratulations to Jane Kitaevich for being awarded CEW+'s Mary Malcomson Raphael Scholarship!
The Mary Malcomson Raphael Scholarship was established in 1985 by Margaret Earhart Smith, in recognition of her dear friend. The scholarship supports women graduate students in a humanities or social science field in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. The scholarships are awards of distinction presented to women held in the highest esteem by their faculty, who have demonstrated academic excellence and potential to make a contribution of exceptional usefulness to society. Upon establishing the scholarship, Mrs. Earhart Smith recalled Mrs. Malsomson Raphael as a singularly resourceful and creative woman who “had a gift for evoking power in people above and beyond their ordinary capacity.”
Jane Kitaevich is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Michigan, where she is completing a dissertation that examines the impact of militarized violence on individual support for democracy, with a focus on Armenia as a case study. Born in post-Soviet Georgia during a time of civil wars and economic collapse, Jane’s early experiences with societal turmoil inspired her commitment to understanding how violence shapes political behavior and democratic governance. At age 15, she moved to the United States on a full scholarship, which allowed her to complete high school and later earn her bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Yeshiva University and a master’s degree from Harvard University, where she specialized in regional studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
