Ryan Gartland is the Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES). He holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago (2020) and an MSc in History from the University of Edinburgh (2024). Before joining CREEES, Ryan taught AP European History and AP World History for Chicago Public Schools (2014-2024) and served as an Exam Reader for the College Board. He is also an avid world traveler, with particularly extensive travel and study abroad experiences in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia, and hopes in the near future to finally make it to Armenia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. His affiliations with Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia originated while growing up in Michigan during the early 1990s and hearing historical accounts from Lithuanian, Polish, and Bosnian diasporas, as well as paying attentive focus to the events surrounding the collapse of European communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He became fascinated as an undergraduate at Michigan State with the historical relationship between Poles and Ukrainians within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and pursuing this interest became the impetus for him to not only major in History as a subject but also specialize in Russian & East European studies as a topic. He is very excited to join the REEES team at Pitt as the next chapter of his professional career, and looks forward to contributing to a setting uniquely purposed towards advancing understandings of the peoples and places specific to the CREEES mission. He is always pleased to meet with students who seek to discuss academic enrollment with the center or to just chat about shared topics of interest. And, of course, he looks forward to when peace returns to Ukraine.