Ryan Culpepper
After his BA in Spanish, Ryan Culpepper spent three years as an American Peace Corps volunteer in Novomoskovsk, Ukraine, teaching English in a village school. There, in addition to winning awards as a teacher from the local and regional governments, he undertook a 2-year project to write comprehensive new English-language curricula for grades 8 to 11, replacing the Soviet textbooks full as they were of unwieldy texts for memorization. In his second and third years as a volunteer, he taught two dozen village teachers in the content of the curricula and in communicative teaching methods, and those teachers are now working as teacher trainers. He also obtained a USAID development grant to open a small business centre in Novomoskovsk with 6 free computers and the village’s first internet connection. He trained the centre’s first employees so that the centre now offers free instruction in basic job skills.
But Ryan saw a larger need. He joined two other Peace Corps volunteers and two Ukrainian colleagues in creating an NGO, International Outreach Coalition. The IOC invites young people from both developed and developing countries around the world to attend summer camps in Ukraine and Armenia, where they discuss the principles and responsibilities of civil society, build relationships, and create small projects. After each camp, the IOC provides small grants for camp alumni to create and implement volunteer projects in their communities as well as on the international level. Using the training they’ve received at camps, the new leaders take up initiatives to improve life around them. Ryan led the first summer program hosted in Armenia in 2007 and remains a member of the IOC board of directors.
In Ukraine, Ryan discovered that his friends and colleagues regretted not the Soviet Union but rather the hope they had once had that a better society could be built by the collective, grassroots actions of all the world’s citizens. In addition to building confidence and organization skills in order to restore hope, Ryan developed an overwhelming curiosity about the hopes of progressive people in the United States and the Soviet Union in the first three decades of the twentieth century. He is currently writing a PhD thesis at the Centre for Comparative Literature examining the collective dreams for alternative political, social, and cultural arrangements inspiring writers, filmmakers, activists, and clinicians at the time. Working in Russian and English, in literature, cinema, and psychology, he is quite literally going back to the future, excavating past hopes in the archives newly opened by the end of the Cold War. Inspired by those he has worked to help, he is studying where they came from in order to understand where he has come from and where we all are going and may collectively choose to go.
Ryan was awarded a prestigious Vanier fellowship in 2010.
