TCUP Conference 2021: Speakers

Dominique Arel 

Dominique Arel is Associate Professor in Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa. He obtained his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a pre-doctoral scholar at Duke University, a post-doctoral scholar at Columbia University, and taught at McGill University and Brown University, before joining the Chair in 2003. His new book on the war in Donbas, co-written with Jesse Driscoll (UC San Diego) is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. He has written on language and regional politics in Ukraine, including in the volume The Battle for Ukrainian, published by HURI. He has organizes the Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine and is the Convention Director of the Annual ASN World Convention.

Dominique Arel

Olga Aivazovska 

Olga Aivazovska is Chairwoman of the Civil Network OPORA, international expert in electoral matters, parliamentary and development of draft laws.  Aivazovska was a director of national nonpartisan observation missions in Ukraine with over 25,000 activists and participated in electoral observation in more than 10 countries of Europe.  She was included in the top 100 most influential and most successful women of Ukraine in 2014-2020 (according to different political editions). Aivazovska often participates in political TV programs, publishes articles and information materials on the electoral legislation reform and advancement of democracy. Aivazovska is alumnus of Draper Hills Summer Fellowship on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford and Ukrainian school of political studies (founded by European Council and Agency for Legislative Initiatives). 

Civil Network OPORA catalyzes social change for sustainable development. It encourages citizens to participate in public life (mobilization and participation). Development of good governance in the public sphere: strengthening/maintaining the quality of public governance (transparency, openness, accountability) in the context of decision-making and policy-making process; ensure openness of institutions, state authorities and data. OPORA is creating a new quality of policies. 

Aivazovska portrait

Margarita M. Balmaceda

Margarita M. Balmaceda (PhD, Princeton University) is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and the 2020-2021 Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She also heads the Study Group “Energy materiality: Infrastructure, Spatiality and Power” at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (Germany). Her new book, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of  Technopolitics from Siberia to  Ukraine to the European Union will be published in March by Columbia University Press. Following three energy molecules (a natural gas molecule, an oil molecule. and a coal molecule) traveling from production in Siberia to final use in Germany via Ukraine, it analyzes how the unique material characteristics of different types of energy affect how each type of energy may be "used" – not only technically but also politically. 

Twitter: @BalmacedaEnergy

Balmaceda portrait

Tania Bulakh 

Tania Bulakh is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on internally displaced and conflict-affected people in Ukraine, in terms of state-citizenship negotiations, social welfare provision, and humanitarian responses. Bulakh is also a Program Officer at the National Endowment for Democracy, where she manages Ukraine portfolio. Previously, she earned her MA in Anthropology from Indiana University as a Fulbright Scholar, worked as a communication director for the Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and co-developed an educational initiative for displaced children in Ukraine. 

Tania Bulakh

Emily Channell-Justice

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is forthcoming, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.

Emily Channell-Justice

Francis Fukuyama 

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Director of Stanford's Master's in International Policy Program. 

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics.  His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions.   His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in Sept. 2018.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science.  He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation,  and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. 

Twitter: @FukuyamaFrancis

Francis Fukuyama

Oleksandra Gaidai

Oleksandra Gaidai is a graduate of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with a major in History. She earned her Ph.D. in History at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Science of Ukraine in 2016. She was granted a fellowship at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) and is an alumna of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Gaidai specializes in memory studies and the contemporary history of Ukraine. Presently, she manages academic projects at the Ukrainian Institute, a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

Oleksandra Gaidai

Olexiy Haran

Olexiy Haran is Professor of Comparative Politics at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (UKMA). Since 2015, he has served as Research Director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF), a leading Ukrainian analytical and sociological think tank. DIF's 2004 exit poll revealed falsifications and, thus, provided background for the Orange Revolution. 

Twitter: @o_haran

Olexiy Haran

Yaroslav Hrytsak

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History of Ukraine at Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine), where he is the director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History and Society. He is the founding editor of the Ukraina Moderna journal and the author of numerous publications on the modern history of Ukraine, including Prophet in His Native Land: Ivan Franko and His Community (Kyiv, 2006; Polish translation in 2011; English translation in 2018). He has various Ukrainian and foreign awards for academic achievements and public activity.

Yaroslav Hrytsak

Sasha Jason

Sasha Jason currently runs the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She graduated with an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) from the University of Michigan. 

Twitter: @sashasjason

Sasha Jason

Adrian Karatnycky

Adrian Karatnycky is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-director its Ukraine in Europe Program. He also is a co-director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and is the Former President of Freedom House, where he headed the Survey of Freeedom in the World and created its Nations in Transit annual study of reform in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. 

Twitter: @adriankaratnycky

Adrian Karatnycky

Nataliya Kibita

Before joining the University of Edinburgh as a visiting research fellow in June 2019, Nataliya Kibita taught Soviet history and history of the Cold War at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Soviet history at the University of Edinburgh. Kibita received her Ph.D. from the University of Geneva in 2008, her MA in European Studies from the European Institute of the University of Geneva in 2001 and her BA from the National University ‘Ostroh Academy’ in Ukraine in 1999. 

Nataliya Kibita

Oleksandra Matviichuk

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights defender who works on issues in Ukraine and the Eurasia region. At present, she heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.  

Matviichuk has experience in creating horizontal structures for massive involvement of people in human rights activities against attacks on rights and freedoms, as well as a multi-year practice of documenting violations during armed conflict. She is the author of a number of alternative reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and the International Criminal Court. She initiated the #LetMyPeopleGo and #SaveOlegSentsov (new name #PrisonersVoice) international campaigns to release political prisoners detained by the Russian authorities 

In 2016 she received the Democracy Defender Award for "Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights" from missions to the OSCE. In 2017 she became the first woman to participate in the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at Stanford University. 

Twitter: @avalaina

Oleksandra Matviichuk

Olga Onuch

Olga Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is an Associate Professor in Politics [Senior Lecturer] at the University of Manchester. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding research posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014), and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate Fellow of Nuffield College (Oxford) and of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Onuch held a Research Fellowship at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017.  

Her first book, Mapping Mass Mobilizations (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001), as well as the micro level calculi that ordinary citizens make when deciding to join-in. She is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications. Her articles have appeared in leading journals, such as Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, and GeoPolitics

Twitter: @oonuch

Olga Onuch

Rostyslav Pavlenko 

Rostyslav Pavlenko is a Member of Parliament of Ukraine and an associate professor of political science at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where he earned his PhD. Throughout his career, he has led several government and independent think tanks. He specializes in institution development, risk analysis and management.

Rostyslav Pavlenko

Jessica Pisano

Jessica Pisano is Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She writes about people and land in contemporary and twentieth century Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on how economic change affects people’s lives and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Her book The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village won the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies. She is the author of a book manuscript under review about political theater in Ukraine and Russia and is currently writing a twentieth-century political history of a single rural street in Eastern Europe. 

Twitter: @JessicaPisano6 

Jessica Pisano

Galyna Petrenko

Galyna Petrenko is a director at NGO Detector Media. A journalist and media expert with more than 15 years of experience, she currently serves as a Member of the Public Council at the Ukrainian State Film Agency, the Public Council of the Committee of Verkhovna Rada on Freedom of Speech, the Ukrainian Film Academy and the Independent Media Council. She is a co-author of the draft law on restricting election campaigning and countering hidden advertising, roadmaps on reforming political advertising and countering Internet piracy. 

Galyna Petrenko

Serhii Plokhii

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. His interests include intellectual, cultural and international history of Eastern Europe, with emphases on Ukraine. He is the author of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and most recently, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (2019). His books have won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize and the Shevchenko National Prize (2018).

serhii plokhii

Greta Lynn Uehling

Greta Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the Program in Comparative and International Studies and is a faculty associate with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan. Uehling was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine 2015-2017, and in 2018, she was a Summer Fellow with the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. 

Twitter: @uehlingumiched1  

Greta Uehling

Rustem Umerov

Rustem Umerov is a member of Parliament, Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, and a member of the Ukrainian Delegation to PACE. He is also a delegate of the Qurultay of the Crimean Tatar People. 

Twitter: @rustem_umerov

Rustem Umerov

Lucan Ahmad Way

Lucan Ahmad Way is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the developing world. His most recent book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union. Together with Steven Levitsky, Way is currently finishing a book, under contract with Princeton University Press, on the durability of authoritarian regimes founded in violent revolutionary struggle. 

Lucan Way