Meet the SPAN faculty advisors
Advisors are Hired via the University of Minnesota Employment website. For more information about the role of advisors please contact Professor Theofanis Stavrou at 612-624-5734.
Sang-Seok Yoon, 2010 Advisor to South Korea
Sang-Seok Yoon is Teaching Specialist in Korean at the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota. He is ABD in Korean linguistics. His research area includes pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition. He advised the 2006 SPANners to Korea.
Matt Miller, 2010 Advisor to Russia
Matt Miller is assistant professor of history at Northwestern College in St. Paul. A specialist in the history of imperial and Soviet Russia, he studies the development of philanthropy, religion, and education. Dr. Miller earned his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Minnesota. He has lived, studied, and taught for eight years in Russia and is excited to help SPAN students make the most of their two months abroad!
Elizabeth Klages, 2009 Advisor to the European Union
Professor Klages is a Professor of Political Science and has taught at the University of St. Thomas, the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College. Professor Klages advised the 2006 SPANners to Denmark.
Anna Tahinci, 2009 Advisor to Greece
Anna Tahinci, Ph.D., is dedicated to providing students with international education experiences. Multiculturalism was fundamental to her own education, studying in Paris, Athens, and Nanterre. Her numerous experiences in academic and museum institutions intersect with her desire to provide a deep cross-cultural educational experience for her students.
Dr. Anna Tahinci studied History and Archaeology at the University of Athens, Art History and Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, and Museum Studies at the Ecole du Louvre. She earned her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne with a dissertation on “The Collectors of Rodin’s sculptures during his lifetime”. She has worked at the Musée Rodin, the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Harvard University Art Museums and has taught Art History and Comparative Literature at Boston University Paris. She is currently working at the University of Minnesota with the history department as a research affiliate.
Pamina Firchow, 2008 Advisor to Argentina
Pamina Firchow is a doctoral candidate in Development Studies at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, where she is writing a dissertation on social change in Argentina. She was a Rotary World Peace Scholar in Buenos Aires from 2003-2005, where she completed a masters degree at the Universidad del Salvador with a thesis on social movement integration into democratic institutions after the crisis of 2001. She also holds a masters degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics. Currently she is a community faculty member at Metro State University, Minneapolis, MN, and is in the final stages of writing her dissertation.
Plamen Miltenoff, 2008 Advisor to Bulgaria
Professor Miltenoff teaches technology classes at St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN, as information specialist at the library. His passion is still with his previous degrees in history and he teaches honors classes on the Balkans. Please visit his Web page for more information at: web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/faculty
Victoria Coifman, 2008 Advisor to Senegal
Victoria Bomba Coifman, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty of the African American & African Studies Department, and of the graduate faculty of the Department of History. She made her first trip to Senegal in l963-64, collecting oral traditions for the pre-1850 history of the Wolof people of northwestern Senegal. She returns regularly to Senegal as an historian, friend and colleague of heads of two non-profit organizations in Senegal, and to renew her own network of colleagues. Her personal research presently involves the Atlantic slave trade from Rio Pongo in Guinea Conakry to the south, but began in the Senegalese archives in Dakar several years ago.