Biographies
Paradigms in Times of War: Unpacking Research and Policy Challenges
16 & 17 November 2023
Short biographies of participants in alphabetical order
Simone Abendschön has been a professor of political science with a focus on methods and political science research at the University of Giessen since 2015. From 2004 to 2008 she worked as a researcher in the study “Learning to live Democracy”, which investigated socialisation processes of primary school children. In 2009, she received her PhD at the university of Mannheim with her thesis about the political and normative socialisation of primary school children. From 2008 to 2015 she worked at the University of Frankfurt as a researcher and lecturer. Her research interests include in particular political socialisation and public opinion.
Julian Bergmann is a senior researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). He is currently working on a project on the European Union’s global role as part of the research programme “Inter- and transnational cooperation”. He is also a senior lecturer (“Privatdozent”) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where he teaches courses on international relations and European integration. After studying political science and peace and conflict studies at the Universities of Mannheim, Oslo and Tübingen, Bergmann received his PhD in 2017 at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz with a thesis on the European Union as an international mediator in conflicts in the Western Balkans and the South Caucasus. The dissertation was later published as a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan (The EU as International Mediator, 2020). His current research focuses on EU development policy, EU policy towards fragile and conflict-affected states, and the EU’s relations with the countries in its Eastern Neighbourhood. In his most recent research and consultancy work, he deals with the EU’s support for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the linkages between reconstruction and the EU accession process.
Benjamin Beuerle studied history, philosophy and public law in Berlin, Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence. After completing his PhD in Russian history at Humboldt University Berlin he joined the German Historical Institute in Moscow, where he was the scientific coordinator of the international research network “Russia’s North Pacific”. Since March 2022 he has been a researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), where he is co-responsible for the new research focus “Environment, Climate, Energy”. His research interests include the history of climate and energy policies in the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine.
Tymofii Brik is rector at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). He is also Head of Sociological Research and Vice President for International Relations at KSE. He has been working at KSE since 2018. He received his PhD in the social sciences at Charles III University of Madrid in 2013. In 2018 and 2019–2020 he was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and New York University, respectively. In 2018, Brik received the Natalia Panina Award for “Best Young Sociologist of the Year”. Since 2021 he has been the national coordinator of the European Social Survey (ESS) in Ukraine. His wide-ranging research interests include local politics/decentralisation, markets, church-society relations and political attitudes.
Ivaylo Dinev is a Bulgarian political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at ZOiS, where he coordinates the Multi-method Data Laboratory of the KonKoop research network. His main interests are social movements and comparative politics in Southeast Europe, triangulation and multi-method research. He has published in East European Politics, Intersections, the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and others.
Nadja Douglas is a political scientist and researcher at ZOiS, currently coordinating the KonKoop thematic line “In:Security in Eastern Europe”. She holds a Master's degree in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris and a PhD from Humboldt University Berlin. Her doctoral thesis dealt with civil-military relations in the Russian Federation (published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan). She previously worked for the German Bundestag, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and as a Liaison Officer for the OSCE Mission to Moldova. Nadja’s research interests include peace, conflict and security studies, regional conflicts, and state-society relations.
Nina Frieß is a scholar of Slavic literatures and cultures and a researcher at ZOiS. She holds a PhD in Slavic Studies and a MSc in Science Communication. Her research interests include Russophone literatures, children’s and crossover literature, and memory studies. She is also a member of the ZOiS Ethics Committee.
Julia Langbein leads the research cluster “Political Economy and Integration” at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin. She holds a PhD in social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. In her research, she deals with the integration of (semi-)peripheral economies into transnational markets and value chains and the consequences of this for their economic and political development. Her regional focus lies on Eastern Europe and European economic integration, while also taking into account the role of China’s economic engagement.
Kevin Limonier is an associate professor in geography and Slavic studies at the French Institute of Geopolitics (University of Paris 8), and vice director of GEODE, a research centre dedicated to the geopolitics of the datasphere. He is also a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the head of the Observatory of the Russian-Speaking Cyberspace (French Ministry of Armed Forces). His work focuses on the history and geography of the Russian cyberspace, and on the development of new methods of data investigation (OSINT) for geopolitics.
Hakob Matevosyan is a sociologist with a research focus on migration, diaspora, and transnationalism. He is particularly interested in the interplay of memory and historical narratives in the making of social generations and in questions related to diaspora identities, descent, and power relations within and around generations of migrants. Since February 2023, Hakob Matevosyan has been a postdoctoral researcher at ZOiS as part of the ERC-funded project “Moving Russia(ns): Intergenerational Transmission of Memories Abroad and at Home (MoveMeRU)”.
Olga Onuch is Professor of Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester. She obtained her PhD in political science from the University of Oxford in 2011 and joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding research posts at the University of Toronto (2010–2011), the University of Oxford (2011–2014), and Harvard University (2013–2014). She engages in cross-regional comparative work on Eastern Europe and Latin America and focuses on the motivations driving citizens to vote, protest, and/or migrate and factors related to their media consumption, as well as identity formation and policy preferences.
Natalia Otrishchenko is a sociologist and research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine. She holds a PhD in sociological methodology from the Institute of Sociology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (2015). From 2019 to 2022, she was an associate researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany, and in the 2022–2023 academic year, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University, USA. Since March 2022, she has led the Ukrainian team of the “24/02/22, 5 am” documentation initiative. Her research interests include qualitative methods, oral history, memory studies, urban sociology, and the sociology of expertise.
Michael Rochlitz is Associate Professor in the Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. In his research, he investigates the interrelation between political institutions, economic development and societal change, with a regional focus on Russia, the former Soviet Union and China.
Maksym Rokmaniko is an architect, researcher, and educator. He is the founding director of the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), a multidisciplinary research organisation based in Kyiv. The CST investigates the past, present, and future of cities, blending architecture, computer science, and the humanities. Before starting CST, Rokmaniko studied architecture in Kyiv, completed a master’s in Architecture at the University of Oregon (USA), and worked as an architect in Japan and Netherlands.
Gwendolyn Sasse has been the Director of the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin since its establishment in 2016. She is also the Einstein-Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism at Humboldt University, Berlin (since 2021). Previously, she was Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford. She is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research interests include the comparative dynamics of democracy and authoritarianism, protest, war, displacement and the political remittances of migrants. Her current research in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine concentrates on public opinion in Ukraine and on displacement from and within Ukraine.
Marie-Céline Schulte is a social science Principal Investigator and Senior Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Advisor at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, where she is currently leading an eight-country study on GBV impunity. She is also a social epidemiology researcher at the Institute for Medical Psychology at the Charité working on psychoneurobiological recovery and healing from sexual violence. She has taught at the intersection of gender, violence, ethics and safety, and international health at the Heidelberg University Institute of Global Health, the Charité Institute of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
Tetiana Skrypchenko is a sociologist with a master's degree in Sociology from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Since 2018 she has been an integral part of the Ukrainian research institution Sociological Rating Group, serving first as a senior analyst, and currently as Deputy Director of its online research substructure Rating Online. Her expertise lies in both qualitative and quantitative research data analysis, and she has contributed to over 100 prominent research projects, gaining a deep understanding of Ukrainian society. In the context of the war, she has actively participated in 23 waves of surveys in Ukraine and also led 5 research studies involving Ukrainians living abroad. In 2023, Tetiana joined ZOiS to work on a research project focused on the subjects and processes of reconstruction and local development in the de-occupied regions of Ukraine.
Tatjana Thelen is a professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include care, property, kinship and the state. Central to her theorising is the role of care for the (re)production (or dissolution) of significant relations including those to the state. She headed an interdisciplinary research group at the Center for Interdisciplinary research in Bielefeld together with history scholars and was a fellow at the IAS in Paris. Earlier this year she served as the Austrian Chair in Stanford.
Alena Zelenskaia holds two master’s degrees, in International Relations and Social Anthropology. She has studied in Russia, the USA and Germany and gained her first work experience in academia at the American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan and at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). She is currently pursuing her doctorate at LMU, studying marriage migration from third countries to Germany. Alena’s research interests include migration studies, media communication, post-Soviet affairs and issues of minorities and discrimination.
Mela Žuljević is a design researcher with a PhD in architecture (Hasselt University, Belgium). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, working at the intersection of design, cartography and landscape research. Previously, she studied visual communications at the University of Sarajevo and worked as a researcher and lecturer at different academic and cultural organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.