Elina Galperin was born in Minsk, Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 2004, she attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she majored in History and Russian Studies. After finishing her senior thesis on the politics of education among the Kazakhs in the late Imperial period, she graduated in February 2008. In September 2008, she entered into the MA/PhD program in history at the University of Washington at Seattle, where she intends to focus on Central Asia in the 19th century and Russian/Ottoman relations.