Short biographies of participants in alphabetical order
Alexander Agadjanian graduated from Moscow State University and worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Department of Religious Studies of Arizona State University. He currently teaches at the Center for the Study of Religions of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He has published extensively on religions in the modern world, including Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity. Recent publications include the book Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning. Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience (2014) and several co-edited publications on post-Soviet religiosity. He is also co-editor of the journal State, Religion, Church (Moscow).
Mark R. Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Profes-sor Beissinger is author or editor of five books, including most recently (with Stephen Kotkin) Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (2014). His recent writings have dealt with such topics as individual participation in the Ukrainian and Arab Spring revolutions, the impact of new social media on opposition movements in autocratic regimes, and the evolving character of revolutions globally over the last century.
Tsypylma Darieva is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS). She is an associate member of the Caucasus Studies Programme at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and a board member of the Berlin Centre for Independent Social Research. Before joining ZOiS, she coordinated an international research project on the transformation of sacred places at the Friedrich Schiller University. At ZOiS, Tsypylma co-develops the research area 'Migration and Tansnationalism' and focuses on the transformation of urban spaces and religious pluralisation in Eurasian cities.
Denis Eckert is a geographer and currently research director at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. From 2011 to 2015, he has been director at LISST, an Interdisciplinary Research Center (UMR 5193 LISST) at the University of Toulouse. As a researcher, he works in the areas of regional and urban geography as well as science and technology studies. His current research is focused on spatial patterns of academic research and innovation at global and European scales. He has previously done comparative research on the EU, and on post-communist states of the Former Soviet Union (mainly Russia). He is currently developing new research on contemporary Ukraine: migrations of high-skilled persons (students and workforce) and bordering processes.
Regina Elsner studied catholic theology in Berlin and Münster. She worked as a project coordinator for Caritas Russia in St. Petersburg from 2005 to 2010. Afterwards, she worked as a research assistant for the Ecumenical Institute in Münster on the project “Russische Orthodoxie und Moderne” as a member of the Project Network “Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism”. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. with a thesis on historical and theological aspects of the Russian Orthodox discourse on modernity. Currently, Dr. Elsner is a research fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) with a project on the social ethics of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Christian Fröhlich is an associate professor in sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, where he is also the academic director of the international M.A. programme Comparative Social Research. He holds an M.A. in sociology and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Leipzig. His research interests include social movements, civil society, urban transformation, (de-)democratization and collective action. He recently co-edited the book Radical Left Movements in Europe to appear in Routledge ́s ‘The Mobilization Series on Social Movements, Protest, and Culture’.
Tatiana Golova studied sociology at the State University of St. Petersburg, the University of Bielefeld and the European University in St. Petersburg. She gained her first research experience at the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the field of youth sociology (1998-1999). In 2009, she gained her doctorate at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg with a thesis on the link between spatial and identity construction in the radical left-wing milieu. Since 2016, she is a researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies.
Samuel Greene is director of the Russia Institute at King`s College London and senior lecturer in Russian politics. Prior to moving to London in 2012, he lived and worked in Moscow for 13 years, most recently as director of the Centre for the Study of New Media & Society at the New Economic School, and as deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. His book Moscow in Movement: Power & Opposition in Putin`s Russia was published in August 2014. He holds a Ph.D. in political sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Imke Hansen is a historian and political scientist specialising in Eastern European Studies, Me-mory Studies, and Oral History. Currently based at the Nordost-Institut at Hamburg University, she researches social conditions of memory in the DFG-project Jews and Germans in Polish Collective Memory. She was a faculty at the interdisciplinary Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University, where she taught at the international master programme Holocaust and Genocide Studies. As a trainer, she engages in non-formal education and works extensively in Ukraine and Belarus. Combining theory and practice, she strives to enhance dialogue and public discourse about experiences of collective violence, trauma and loss.
Ketevan Khutsishvili is professor of anthropology at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. She studied ethnography at Tbilisi State University and wrote dissertations on The dream and the dream interpretation in Georgian everyday life and The Influence of Religious Factor on the Ethno-cultural Identification and Civil Integration (The Case of the Modern Georgia). Her research interests include ethno-cultural processes in the Caucasus, religious issues, ethnic identity and relations, conflicts and IDP studies, and economic anthropology. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in various parts of Georgia, Caucasus and Turkey.
Vladimir Kolosov is the head of the Centre of Geopolitical Studies at the Institute of Geography and of the Department of Geography of World Economy at Moscow State University. From 2012 to 2016, Professor Kolosov was president of the International Geographical Union (IGU). He was the principal investigator or headed the Russian part of many international research projects supported by European FPs, CNRS (France), NSF (USA), etc. One of his main research interests are borders and bordering in the post-Soviet space. Currently he is finishing a research project and a monograph on Russian and post-Soviet land borders, and an Atlas of Russian borders.
Sabine von Löwis studied economic and social geography at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) and obtained a doctorate at HafenCity University in Hamburg. From 2011 to 2017, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch, where she was involved in the joint research project “Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa” (Phantom borders in East and Eastern Central Europe) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In December 2017, Sabine von Löwis joined the research team at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), where she is currently developing a project on microgeographies of conflict constellations in the southwestern post-Soviet space.
Mikhail Minakov is Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and DAAD Visiting Professor at Europe University Viadrina. Minakov is also a Senior Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Editor-in-chief of Kennan Focus Ukraine, and Editor-in-chief of Ideology and Politics Journal. His research interests focus on ideology, social experience, social and political imagination, as well as long term epistemological tendencies in modernity. Mikhail Minakov is the author of over a hundred articles and research papers, and several books including Kant’s Concept of the Faith of Reason (2001), History of Experience (2007), Photosophy (2017), and Development and Dystopia (2018).
Magdalena Nowicka is Professor for Migration and Transnationalism at the Humboldt Universität Berlin and leader of the ERC founded project TRANSFORmIG. She holds a summa cum laude doctoral degree in sociology from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (2005), a Master of Arts degree in cultural studies from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (2001) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations from the University of Warsaw, Poland (1999). She worked previously at the Institute of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen.
Gwendolyn Sasse is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. She is currently the director of the newly founded Centre for East European Research and International Studies in Berlin (ZOiS). Her research interests include post-communist transitions, comparative democratization, ethnic conflict, and migration. She has just completed a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on ‘Political Remittances: The Political Impacts of Migration’. Her book The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (2007; paperback 2014) won the Alexander Nove Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies.
Jelena Tošić is currently a research fellow and lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Her main areas of research are: (forced) migration and border studies, state and transnationalism and temporality / history / memory. Her recent publications include the article The relational ethics of ‘never (…) too much’: Situating and scaling intimate uncertainties in an Adriatic harbour in the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (forthcoming 2018) and the chapter Travelling Genealogies: Tracing relatedness and diversity in the Albanian- Montenegrin Borderland in the book Border Crossing – Border Moving (2017).
Mihai Varga is a research fellow in sociology at the Eastern Europe Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation published in 2014 as Worker protests in Ukraine and Romania. Striking with tied hands (Manchester University Press). His research and teaching focus on post-communist market reforms and on right-wing contestations of liberalism. He is the co-editor with Katharina Bluhm of a forthcoming volume titled New Conservatives in Russia and Central Eastern Europe (Routledge).
Ievgeniia Voloshchuk is currently a researcher at Axel Springer-Stiftungsprofessur für deutsch-jüdische Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, Exil und Migration at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), where she conducts a research project titled ‘Die Ukraine als Palimpsest: ukrainische Welt und deutschsprachige Literatur von der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart’ supported by the Thyssen Foundation. The project deals with images of Ukraine in German-speaking literature, among others in the works of German-Jewish authors and authors of Ukrainian background. From 2003 to 2016, she worked at Schewtschenko-Institute for Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kiev).
Catherine Wanner is Professor of History and Cultural Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1998), Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (2007), which won four best book prizes and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and co-editor of Religion, Morality and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (2008). She is also the editor of State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (2012) and editor of three collections of essays on resistance and renewal during the Maidan protests. She is currently writing a book on the politics of religion, faith and belonging in Ukraine. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology of Humboldt Universität.