Andrew McKernan of Bow has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Moscow during the 2009-10 academic year. McKernan will graduate from the University of New Hampshire on Saturday with a double major in Russian language and linguistics. He will enroll in the Ph.D. program in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in September 2010 to prepare for a college-level teaching career.

How did you become interested in Russian history and language and Soviet Union architecture? During my sophomore year at UNH, I talked to Cathy Frierson, a Russian history professor, about traveling to Russia and doing research. . . . Vladimir Fedov is a fantastic architectural historian who I met when I spent the summer in Moscow, and he agreed to be my mentor for my Fulbright.

What is the focus of your research, and what do you hope to gain from it? What I have been looking at is the evolution of different architectural sites in Moscow, how buildings that were built under Stalin have been upkept, if they were destroyed, if people have built new projects that look like them, and what kind of architectural reactions there have been to them.

Your winning honors program essay in 2008 was on democracy, yet your research focuses on communist politics. How did these varying perspectives influence your writing? The essay that I wrote is pretty closely tied with what I am doing now. It was about the meaning of the English word for "freedom" and Russian word for "freedom." My research is about semiotics and studying the meaning of architecture.

How and when did you decide to pursue a career as a college professor? I think it was this summer when I was in Moscow. . . . I had an opportunity to TA the introductory linguistics course, and I helped with the grading and taught a couple of class sessions and really enjoyed that.

You were a four-year presidential scholar and received prizes for academic excellence in Russian language from UNH. What do these achievements mean to you? They mean a lot. . . . It's not something that I am necessarily going for, but I am very honored and gratified to receive them.