Professor Golfo Alexopoulos (Photo courtesy of University of South Florida)
Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies and director of the USF Institute for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (IREES), Golfo Alexopoulos, has been awarded a $700,000 grant to study Russian speakers in online spaces, including Kremlin propaganda and internet usage patterns among Russians.
Alexopoulos, principal investigator on the grant, will also be collaborating with Mark Kramer of Harvard University and Nadia Boyadjieva of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
The grant, which is funded for a three-year term by the Department of Defense (DoD), is awarded as part of the Minerva Research Initiative, which supports basic research in social and behavioral sciences on topics of relevance to U.S. national security.
A total of $18 million in grants were awarded to 11 university-based faculty teams. The 11 university awardees were selected from approximately 130 applicants in six categories, using a merit competition that evaluated proposals for their potential to make foundational contributions to basic social science and alignment with the National Defense Strategy.
“This Minerva grant enhances USF’s research profile in the area of national security. It also enhances USF’s research profile overall because Minerva grants are highly competitive federal grants. Only about 8% of applications were funded in this cycle,” Alexopoulos said.
Alexopoulos’ area of expertise is rooted in the politics and history of the Soviet Union, more specifically, the Stalin era. Her work in this area has enabled her to develop a deep understanding of the Soviet/Russian security services that have shaped figures like Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest entourage.
“The anti-Western narratives, ideological tropes and conspiracies, and geopolitical objectives of current Russian efforts have their origins in an earlier period,” Alexopoulos explains. “The Soviet security services were actively engaged in what they called ‘active measures’ to spread disinformation and undermine their perceived Cold War adversaries in the West. In many ways, we are witnessing the continuity of an earlier practice, but one turbocharged by new technologies like social media.”
As director of IREES, she has worked with various professionals from CENTCOM and SOCOM over the years, which helped bolster the grant proposal.
“I think that this work enhanced our proposal. I also believe that USF’s new Global and National Security Institute (GNSI), led by someone of General Frank McKenzie’s caliber, has put USF on the map in this area,” Alexopoulos said. “General McKenzie wrote a letter in support of the Minerva grant and is an important advocate for USF’s diverse research initiatives in the area of national security, broadly understood.”
Alexopoulos believes it is critical that academics are included in discussions related to national security.
“National security problems are too large and complex for one group to tackle alone. I think that it’s important to include diverse perspectives, training, and expertise from both government and academia. We all benefit from shared knowledge and research.”
“My hope is that the research produced by this grant will serve U.S. policymakers by improving their understanding of this global problem and providing new insight and foreign policy options,” she said. “The goal of the Minerva Research Initiative, according to its website, ‘is to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.’ This is what I hope our research achieves.”