IOWC Graduate Assistants
Rashed Chowdhury
Rashed holds a BA (Hons) in International Relations from Grinnell College in Iowa (his thesis examined relations between Russia and the “near abroad” in the 1990s) and an MA in Islamic Studies from McGill (with a thesis on the role of Shi‘ite clerics in identity formation in Iraq between 1914 and 1924). He is currently pursuing a PhD in history at McGill, with a focus on the socio-political and economic aspects of the Hijaz Railway, constructed by the Ottoman Empire between 1900 and 1908. He has won a number of awards for academic excellence, most recently the McGill Graduate Studies Fellowship (2006-08). During his time as Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C. (2003-2004), Rashed provided research assistance to Anatol Lieven, Anders Åslund and Husain Haqqani in a range of fields, including the social context of American foreign policy, the state of the Russian economy, and the Muslim minority in France. Rashed is active in interfaith dialogue, and contributes articles to ARCHE, a cultural and literary magazine in his native Belarus. His languages include fluent Belarusian, Bengali and Russian, intermediate Arabic and French, and some Czech, Hindi, Latin, Polish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
His Publications Include:
2008. “Barack Obama i novaia amerykanskaia mara” [Barack Obama and the New American Dream], ARCHE (Minsk) 66.
2008. “Pra svaikh dy chuzhykh” [About Our Own and Strangers], ARCHE (Minsk) 64-65.
2003. “Europe: Defining a Continent”, Paragon (Grinnell, Iowa) 1.
