Samuel Bowden
Samuel Bowden
Sam Bowden is from Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated valedictorian from Kenyon College in 2024 with degrees in English and Russian literatures. At Kenyon, he received the S. Georgia Nugent Award in Creative Writing, the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Prize, the Russian Prize, the Critical Language Scholarship, and a Foreign Language Area Studies grant, and spent a summer volunteering at a refugee shelter on the Poland-Ukraine border. His honors thesis investigated the relationship between English translations of Russian literature and geopolitical conflict between the English- and Russian-speaking worlds in light of the war in Ukraine. For his second thesis, he created МОСТ (The Bridge), a bilingual journal featuring writing from diverse and dissident Gen-Z Russophone poets alongside his translations.
While a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, his research focused on the ways Russia leverages its cultural and literary legacies abroad to control and suppress other nations. He currently works as a Russia Studies Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations and as the managing fiction editor at Asymptote, a leading journal for literature in translation. He also volunteers remotely as an English tutor for Ukrainian students.
As a Marshall Scholar, Sam will study Eastern European history and Modern Languages, focusing on the connections between literature, language, and politics in the post-Soviet region. He is proficient in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Georgian, and reads Old Church Slavonic, Old Norse, and French. He has played cello for fourteen years, and writes novels in his spare time.