2024 TCUP Conference Speakers

Tarak Barkawi, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University

Tarak Barkawi is the Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He is a scholar of war and empire. His interdisciplinary scholarship re-imagines relations between war, armed forces and society in modern world politics. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His last book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, Tarak is working on two projects. The first concerns the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. It explores soldiers’ history writing as a site for war’s constitutive presence in society and politics. The second project considers why small wars and imperial military relations have had such large consequences for major powers and for world politics.

Theodora (Dora) Chomiak, CEO, Razom

Dora Chomiak is CEO of Razom for Ukraine (Razom). Razom, which means “together” in Ukrainian, is a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid, and administers programs and services focused on health, advocacy, civil society and culture. Razom advances its mission by creating spaces where people meet, partner and do, while maintaining its focus on Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, Razom has raised over $100 million and grown to include over 200,000 donors and volunteers. Dora has been a passionate advocate for the global contributions of Ukraine since her first trip there in 1989. She cooperated with numerous international organizations in Ukraine including Soros, USAID and Internews. She co-founded a media incubator that launched several major non-governmental news organizations in newly independent Ukraine. She led a $7 million grant from USAID until 1994 with Internews and co-founded Internews-Ukraine. She contributed to growing businesses at global companies through strategic marketing and innovation. Dora earned her AB from Princeton University and an MBA from Columbia University. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Timothy J. Colton, Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Harvard University

Timothy Colton is Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies. He is a past director of the Davis Center and a past chair of the Department of Government. His main research interest is Russian and Eurasian government and politics. He is the author of, among other works, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (Council on Foreign Relations, 1986); Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Harvard University Press, 1995), which was named best scholarly book in government and political science by the Association of American Publishers; Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Harvard University Press, 2000); Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000, with Michael McFaul (Brookings, 2003); Yeltsin: A Life (Basic Books, 2008, and published in Russia by Atticus-Azbuka in 2013); Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia, with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2017). Fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 2011.

Volodymyr Dubovyk, Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine), Visiting Professor, Fletcher, Tufts, and Senior Fellow, Center for European Policy Analysis

Volodymyr Dubovyk is an Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). V. Dubovyk has conducted research at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997, 2006-2007), at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (2002), taught at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 2013 and at St. Edwards university/University of Texas (Austin) in 2016-17. Volodymyr has been a Fulbright Scholar twice. He is the co-author of “Ukraine and European Security” (Macmillan, 1999) and has published numerous articles on US-Ukraine relations, regional and international security, and Ukraine’s foreign policy. Currently he is a Visiting Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He is also a recipient of the emergency grant from the Kennan Institute (2022), non-resident fellowships from the George Washington University (2022-2023) and University of Toronto (2022-2023). Areas of expertise: Ukraine, Transatlantic Relations, U.S., Black Sea security, security studies.

Eugene Finkel, Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University. His research seeks to understand how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change, with a special focus on Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Israel/Palestine. Finkel’s most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author and co-author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020, co-authored with Scott Gehlbach) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023, co-authored with Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak Brudny). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, and other journals and edited volumes. Finkel also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs and other media outlets.

Eugene M. Fishel, Distinguished Fellow, Center for Security Policy Studies, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University

Gene Fishel is a Distinguished Fellow at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.  He has held various U.S. Government posts, including Deputy Director in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); Senior Advisor for Emerging Threats (INR); Senior Advisor for Russian Malign Activities and Trends in the Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs; Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council; Special Advisor to the Vice President; and Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.  He has also worked at the embassies in Kyiv and Mensk. Dr. Fishel has taught in an adjunct capacity at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.  He completed a Mid-Career Fellowship at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and the Senior Executives in National and International Security program at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Prior to joining the State Department, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy. Dr. Fishel is the author of The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy Toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin, published by HURI.

Oleksii Goncharenko, member of the Ukrainian Parliament, member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and Vice President of the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons

Oleksii Goncharenko is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and Vice President of the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons. In Parliament, he is a member of the ‘European Solidarity group’, and head of the caucuses ‘For Democratic Belarus’, and ‘For Free Caucasus’. MP Goncharenko is a founder of Ukraine’s largest network of educational-cultural centers, the Goncharenko Centers, which have become volunteer hubs since February 2022. MP Goncharenko has been fighting against Russian propaganda and publishes widely in international media to bring the truth to the world about Ukraine. He is included in the sanctioned persons lists of the Russian Federation. MP Goncharenko is a guest speaker at Yale University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Melinda Haring, Senior Advisor, Razom for Ukraine

Melinda Haring is an internationally recognized expert on Ukraine. Haring is a senior advisor at Razom for Ukraine and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Previously, she was the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and editor of the Atlantic Council’s popular publication, the UkraineAlert blog. She is the author of the report Reforming the democracy bureaucracy (FPRI, 2013) coauthor of Biden and Ukraine: a strategy for the next administration (Atlantic Council, 2021), Biden and Belarus: a strategy for the next administration (Atlantic Council, 2021), Ukraine’s internally displaced persons hold a key to peace (Atlantic Council, 2017), and a contributor to Does democracy matter? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Haring has worked for the Superhumans Center, Eurasia Foundation, Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute. A graduate of Georgetown University, she holds an MA in Government with a certificate in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Haring is the chair of the board of East Europe Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a member of the supervisory board of Right to Protection in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Volodymyr Kulyk, Columbia University

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has also taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and other Western scholarly institutions. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity as well as political and media discourse in contemporary Ukraine, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Professor Kulyk is the author of four books, the latest of which is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Relevance to Ukraine) that was published in Kyiv in 2021. Currently he is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

Dr. Erica Marat, Professor, National Defense University

Dr. Erica Marat is a Professor at the College of Security Affairs of the National Defense University. Her research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Europe, Central Asia, India, and Mexico. Before joining NDU, Dr. Marat was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. She is an author of several books, including Transformative Violence: When Routine Cruelty Sparks Historic Mobilization (forthcoming, OUP 2024) and The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (OUP 2018). Her articles appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Just Security, and Open Democracy.

Mariam Naiem, Independent Researcher

Mariam is working on making the broad English-speaking community understand the cultural context of the Russian war in Ukraine. In particular, she aims to describe the colonial and racial aspects and practices of Russian culture with respect to Ukraine and other peoples colonized by Russia, and works on decolonizing the discourse on Ukraine in order to center Ukrainian voices and de-center Russian and pro-Russian imperialist narratives. Through her understanding of Ukrainian and Western cultures and her personal experiences, she aims to be a bridge between English-speaking audiences and Ukrainians. Mariam is also a co-host of the award-winning Ukrainian language podcast, "Where are we?" about the colonial past of Ukraine and its influence on the present. In this podcast, she explores the Ukrainian colonial past and its impact on the daily lives and culture of Ukrainians.

Norman M. Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, Senior Fellow (courtesy), Hoover Institution and Freeman-Spogli Institute, Stanford University

Norman M. Naimark is the McDonnell Professor in the History Department at Stanford. He was also educated (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) at Stanford. He taught at Boston University and was a fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard before returning to Stanford as a faculty member in 1988. His recent books include: Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20^th Century Europe (Harvard 2001); Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010); Genocide: A World History (Oxford 2017); and Stalin and the Fate of Europe (Harvard 2019). He was a co-editor of and a contributor to Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History of Genocide (Cambridge, 2023).

Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt, Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a joint academic appointment between the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. At Penn, Schmitt focuses on the project development and field deployment of the Simons Observatory, a new set of experimental cosmology telescopes and energy support infrastructure under construction at a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. In his joint role at Penn, he also pursues research and teaching related to European energy security, transatlantic national security, export control policies, and modern sanctions regimes. Previously, Schmitt was a research associate and project development scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and remains an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and is also an associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute. Schmitt is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founder of the Duke Space Diplomacy Lab, where he is also a fellow of Duke’s Rethinking Diplomacy Program, and a senior fellow for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he focuses on transatlantic energy and national security analysis, as well as emerging space security challenges to the transatlantic community. Previously, Schmitt served as European energy security advisor at the U.S. Department of State.

Twitter: @blschmitt

Oxana Shevel, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Relations Program, Tufts University

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Professor Shevel’s current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. The book won the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. 

Olga Skrypnyk, Chair of the Board of the Crimean Human Rights Group
 
Olga Skrypnyk is Chair of the Board of the Crimean Human Rights Group, a human rights defender from Crimea, a co-coordinator of the Crimea Platform Expert Network. Olga focuses on documenting, analyzing, and informing the authorities, international organizations, intergovernmental structures, non-governmental organizations, and the media on the human rights situation and war crimes in occupied Crimea, collecting and submitting the evidence to the international courts. She is the author of analytical materials on the human rights situation in Crimea, including political prisoners and militarization of the Crimea civilian population. Olga is a member of the Interdepartmental commission to consider issues related to recognizing the persons as deprived of their liberty due to the armed aggression against Ukraine, and to implement the measures aimed at their protection. Olga Skrypnyk is a member of the Advisory Council under the Ombudsman of Ukraine.

Maria Sonevytsky, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music, Bard College

Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College. She has published two books: Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019, winner of the 2020 American Musicological Society’s Lockwood First Book Prize) and Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), accompanied by the first formal release of the band’s cult 1989 cassette album Tantsi on the California-based label Org Music. Prof. Sonevytsky is writing a new book titled Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2022. Earlier, she produced and sang on The Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Songs from a Lost World (released in 2015 on Smithsonian Folkways). In the late 2000s, she developed a multi-media exhibition on Crimean Tatar repatriates called “No Other Home” with the photographer Alison Cartwright Ketz which was shown at museums in Bucharest, Kyiv, New York, and online on the journal Triple Canopy. She has written multiple articles and essays on Ukrainian music, culture, and history, including, recently, public-facing pieces on the ethics of performing Russian Imperial musical works during the Russian war on Ukraine. In addition to her scholarly work, she performs as a singer and accordionist.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, University of Pennsylvania

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines how Soviet and East German people and states understood and portrayed Blackness and race. Since January 2022, she has become a subject matter expert in American and Canadian media on the war in Ukraine. Her public writing addresses issues of race and decolonization in Russian and Ukrainian foreign policy and internal politics. She holds an MA in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies from Harvard University and an MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Lena Surzhko Harned, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Public Policy Initiative at Penn State University, Behrend College

Dr. Lena Surzhko Harned is an Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Public Policy Initiative at Penn State University, Behrend College. She is an author of publications dealing with issues of nationalism, identity politics, trade policy, European integration, electoral politics, comparative democratization, and mass political behavior in Eastern Europe. Her co-authored book, Post-Soviet Legacies and Conflicting Values in Europe: Generation WhY (2017) examines the within (generational) and between societal conflicts in cultural values influenced by European integration and lingering soviet legacies in modern Russia and Ukraine. Dr. Surzhko Harned current research projects focus on ideology of Russki Mir and its influence on Russian policy in Ukraine and wider world, dynamics of decolonization in Ukrainian politics and society, politics and religion in Ukraine and Russia, and nationalism and identity in Ukrainian society, particularly among self-described Russian-speakers.

Jolanta Szymańska, Polish Institute of International Affairs

Jolanta Szymańska is the Head of the European Union Programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs and an expert on the institutional system of the European Union and the EU migration policy. She holds a doctorate in Political Science (University of Warsaw, 2012) and attended Erasmus scholarship at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She was a lecturer at the University of Warsaw (2008–2020) and National School of Public Administration (2016-2019). She is the author of many publications on the political system of the European Union and EU migration policy. Recently, she edited a book on the EU in the face of Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State University

Catherine Wanner is Petro Jacyk Distinguished Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (Fall 2023). She is a Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State University. She earned her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University before embarking on over 30 years of ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine.  Her most recent monograph is Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2022), and she is the editor of the forthcoming book Dispossession: Anthropological Approaches to Russia’s War against Ukraine (Routledge, 2023). Her research has focused primarily on the politics of religion in Ukraine and increasingly on human rights and conflict mediation within the context of war. She is the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity.