Rachael Merritt

Biography

Rachael Merritt is a senior at the University of Michigan, where she is double majoring in International Studies and Russian. She has been deeply involved in regional affairs, traveling to Russia and Kyrgyzstan, and working closely with Russian journalists and activists. At Michigan, she co-founded the Flying Subtitles Collective, a group that provides free professional translation and subtitling services for Russian activists, students, and journalists to promote the accessibility of critical information. In various positions, she has written on Russian and Belarusian politics as well as digital democracy and internet accessibility.

At Oxford, Rachael plans to study in the Russian and Eastern Europe and Social Science of the Internet programs in order to form a more comprehensive understanding of authoritarian employment of the internet in information operations used to undermine democratic institutions, particularly the free press. She is eager to work with NGOs or state bodies situated in this thematic and regional intersection.