W&L’s Nick Mosher ’22 Awarded Fulbright to Kazakhstan Mosher has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to teach English in Kazakhstan. He will also spend this summer receiving intensive Russian language training in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Nick Mosher ’22Washington and Lee University graduate Nick Mosher ’22 has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) to teach English in Kazakhstan. At W&L, Mosher double majored in global politics and Russian. Mosher is a native of Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
“I am learning Russian, so the time in a Russian-speaking country will be beneficial for my language progress,” said Mosher. “The Russian Area Studies Program at W&L has some amazing professors like Richard Bidlack, Anna Brodsky and Yulia Rubina who were influential in my decision to major in Russian.”
At W&L, Mosher was on the football team and was the founding editor-in-chief of Liberty Lexington, an online human rights newspaper founded and staffed by W&L students. Mosher founded the nonprofit newspaper in 2020 to report human rights abuses in Eurasia. He spent the past summer in Ukraine, where he worked at a summer camp in Kyiv and took Russian language classes as a recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship.
“A number of us at Liberty Lexington spent the summer of 2021 in Ukraine,” Mosher said earlier this year, “and we are heartbroken to see what is happening there now and to hear from our Ukrainian friends who are either fleeing the country or under siege in Kyiv. We are trying to do everything we can to help them while being on the other side of the world.”
Mosher was the recipient of a second Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) in 2022. The CLS Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and is a fully funded summer overseas language and cultural immersion program for American students. This summer, Mosher will be in Tbilisi, Georgia, receiving intensive Russian language training at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. The program consists of immersive language training that bans English from being spoken. It also includes cultural excursions, lectures, and lessons on history and politics to get a better sense of the local country and language.
“Nick Mosher is a ball of smart, creative, caring and happy energy,” said Rich Bidlack, the Martin and Brooke Stein Professor of History at W&L. “He designed and executed a superb and highly original honors thesis for his Russian Area Studies major on the topic of competition and cooperation between Russia and China in Kazakhstan, which is a member of the Russian-centered Eurasian Economic Union as well as an important link in China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. The wide range of sources that he used for his project and his intense study of Russian should serve him well during his upcoming Fulbright year teaching English in Kazakhstan, where Russian is an official language.”
For his Fulbright ETA this fall, Mosher will leave for Kazakhstan in September and plans to spend 10 months there.
After he completes the Fulbright program, Mosher plans to apply for additional scholarships to aid his post-graduate studies.
Washington and Lee University is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2021-2022 Fulbright U.S. Students for the fourth consecutive year.
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