TCUP Conference 2022: Speakers

Yulia Bezvershenko

Yulia Bezvershenko is a Fellow of the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University. 

In 2020-2021 she served as a Director-General of the Directorate for Science and Innovation (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine), responsible for policy development and implementation in the research, development, and innovation sectors. 

Bezvershenko was a researcher at the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics (National Academy of Science of Ukraine, NASU) and a senior lecturer at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 2014, she has been deeply involved in the national R&D reform in Ukraine, primarily focusing on institution building. Until 2019, she had been a Deputy Head of Young Scientists Council of NASU and Vice-President of NGO "Unia Scientifica" aimed to promote science and advocate science reform in Ukraine. Her mission is to build knowledge-based Ukraine as an economy and society benefiting from knowledge creation, distribution, and utilization. 

Bezvershenko holds a Master of Public Policy and Governance from the Kyiv School of Economics, a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an MSc in Physics from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Twitter: @Yu_Bezvershenko

Olga Boichak

Olga Boichak is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a sociologist with expertise in computational social science, and her research interests span networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. She is an editor of the Digital War journal and has a track record of publications on contemporary Ukraine with a focus on volunteering, transnational mobilization, and diasporic humanitarianism surrounding the Russian-Ukrainian war. Prior to joining the University of Sydney, Boichak co-led a project that explored the influence of social bots in political conversations online (Syracuse University, USA), and is currently a Chief Investigator on an eSafety Commissioner-funded project that explores patterns of social media use among young people. Her work has appeared, among others, in Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Media, War & Conflict, Global Networks, and the Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. Boichak is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Young Generation Will Change Ukraine (2013), Fulbright Fellowship (2014), International Communication Association’s Top Paper Award (2019), Higher Education Academy Fellowship (2021), and the University of Sydney SOAR Prize (2022-2023).

Twitter: @olgarithmic

Anna Bulakh

Anna Bulakh is Policy Adviser at Reface, an AI powered app for face-swapping with more than 140 million installs. Bulakh has 10 years of experience in security and defence policies. She was a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) in Tallinn and a Research Assistant at the Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI). Since 2019, she has also been part of the IT community developing solutions to help combat online disinformation. Bulakh is a Co-Founder of Cappture.cc, a start-up funded by the Startup Wise Guys accelerator program, and former Program Director at Disinfo.Tech. In her work, she deals with issues such as tech regulation and diplomacy, tech impact on societal security, information and cyber security, broader national security policies, and resilience. Currently, she is engaging with experts and the regulatory community to develop a common approach to the future of AI and synthetic media.

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.

Timothy Colton

Timothy Colton is Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. 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). He has been a Fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 2011.

Carl Dahlman

Carl T. Dahlman (PhD, Geography, 2001) is Professor of International Studies and Geography at Miami University, where he served as director/coordinator of the International Studies program from 2012-2017 and 2019-2021. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters on conflict and peace-building in former Yugoslavia and the Middle East with an emphasis on the interactions between nationalism, territorial claims, and migration. He is the co-author of Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2011). His current research focuses on temporality and state culture, decentralization and autonomy arrangements in multiethnic societies, and state-sponsored forced migration, among other topics. 

Twitter: @CarlDahlman

Paul D'Anieri

Paul D'Anieri is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. His research examines the international and comparative politics of the post-Soviet region, focusing on Ukraine and Russia. His most recent book is Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His other books include The Sources of Russia’s Great Power Politics: Ukraine and the Challenge to the European Order (2018; with Taras Kuzio); Orange Revolution and Aftermath: Mobilization, Apathy, and the State in Ukraine (editor; 2010); Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics and Institutional Design (2007) and Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian-Russian Relations (1999). His article on the consequences of the Donbas conflict in Ukraine’s 2019 elections is forthcoming in Europe-Asia Studies. He is currently researching the potential for resolution of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

Elizabeth Dunn

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is an anthropologist and geographer. Her work focuses on refugees, IDPs, and other forced migrants. Her latest book, No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement, looks at the nexus of the state and humanitarian organizations, particularly at the ways that multinational humanitarian organizations come to take over state functions, thereby transforming the idea of territorial sovereignty. Recently, she has begun looking at the state regulation of essential workers, particularly Rohingya and Somali refugees working in the meatpacking industry, including the ways that state organizations import refugees as a labor source for essential work in the food industry.  As the founding director of the Center for the Study of Forced Migration at Indiana University, Dunn fosters conversations about states, borders, and people on the move.

Twitter: @ElizabethCDunn

Nataliya Gumenyuk

Nataliya Gumenyuk  is a Ukrainian author and journalist specializing in foreign affairs and conflict reporting. She is CEO and co-founder of The Public Interest Journalism which aims at popularizing best practices for public interest journalism in the digital age. From 2015 to 2020 she ran the independent TV-channel hromadske.ua, an initiative of Ukrainian journalists to create public broadcasting in Ukraine, and Hromadske International en.hromadske.ua, a news outlet explaining the Eastern European geopolitical storm in English and Russian. Since the start of the revolution and later conflict in Ukraine, Gumenyuk has been reporting from the field: Maidan, Crimea, Donbas. As an independent, international correspondent, she has reported on major political and social events from nearly 60 countries. Gumenyuk is the author of the book The Lost Island. The Tales From The Occupied Crimea (2020), based on 6 years of reporting from the annexed peninsula. In 2015, she published the book Maidan Tahrir. In Search Of The Lost Revolution – a collection of reportages from the Middle East researching what happens to the societies after the revolution. Gumenyuk is the Member of the Council for Freedom Of Speech Under President of Ukraine and Independent Media Council.

Twitter: @ngumenyuk 

Denis Gutenko

Denis Gutenko served as an advisor to the Minister of Economy and led the foreign economic activities department, working on several reforms, including agricultural land reform and the new currency law. From July 2019-February 2020 he was the acting head of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine. Since September 2021, he is a visiting scholar at Stanford University at the Center of Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Amb. John Herbst

Ambassador John Herbst is the senior director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. Ambassador Herbst served for thirty-one years as a foreign service officer in the US Department of State, retiring at the rank of career minister. He was the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. Prior to his ambassadorship, he was the ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2003. Ambassador Herbst previously served as US consul general in Jerusalem, principal deputy to the ambassador-at-large for the Newly Independent States; director of the Office of Independent States and Commonwealth Affairs, director of regional affairs in the Near East Bureau, and at the embassies in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Saudi Arabia. He most recently served as director of the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University. He has received two Presidential Distinguished Service Awards, the Secretary of State’s Career Achievement Award, the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Distinguished Civilian Service Award. Ambassador Herbst’s writings on stability operations, Central Asia, Ukraine, and Russia are widely published.

Twitter: @JohnEdHerbst

Tetyana Lokot

Tetyana Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. She researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, internet freedom, and internet governance in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine and Russia. Her research has been published in Information, Communication & Society; Social Media + Society; Digital Journalism; Surveillance & Society; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Misinformation Review and Irish Studies in International Affairs. She has presented her research at multiple international conferences and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Moscow Times. Lokot holds a PhD from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. Previously, she was Assistant Professor at the Mohyla School of Journalism (NaUKMA, Kyiv, Ukraine). 

Oksana Mikheieva

Oksana Mikheieva is a DAAD professor at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is also professor of sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv) and a member of the International Association for the Humanities, Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the Ukrainian Sociological Association. Additionally, she serves on the editorial board of Ukraina moderna journal and East (Skhid). She has over twenty years of research and teaching experience. Author or co-author of five books and many articles, she researches a wide range of areas, including the historical aspects of deviant and delinquent behavior, urban studies, paramilitary motivations, the social integration and adaptation of internally displaced persons, resettlement strategies, and the adaptation of the last wave’s Ukrainian migrants. 

Marthe Handå Myhre

Marthe Handå Myhre is a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo Metropolitan University. She holds a Ph.D. in Russia Studies from the University of Oslo. In her Ph.D. project she studied policies of citizenship acquisition in Russia and the reception of forced migrants from Ukraine after war broke out in Donbas in 2014. Her research interests include nation building, nationalism, migration, and citizenship in Russia, Ukraine, and the post-Soviet space. Currently Marthe is part of an international research project studying Russia’s appeal to populists and pragmatists in Europe (https://uni.oslomet.no/proruss/). Her work has previously been published in Russian Review, Nationalities Papers, and East European Politics. Her latest publication (together with Olena Muradyan and Oksana Nekhaienko, V.N Karazin Kharkiv National University) is the book chapter “Educational Reform and Language Policy in Ukraine: Implementation in the Border Regions” in A. Aasland and S. Kropp (eds.) The Accommodation of Regional and Ethno-cultural Diversity in Ukraine.

Twitter: @nibr_no

Serhii Plokhii

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. His interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of, among others, The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present (HURI, 2021); Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W. W. Norton, 2021); Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019); Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Basic Books, 2018); and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015). His books have won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize and the Shevchenko National Prize (2018).

Alina Polyakova

Alina Polyakova is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) as well as an adjunct professor of European studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Polyakova is a recognized expert on transatlantic relations, European security, Russian foreign policy, digital authoritarianism, and populism in democracies. She is the author of the book, The Dark Side of European Integration, which examines the rise of far-right political movements in Europe, as well as dozens of major reports and articles.

Prior to joining CEPA, Polyakova was the Founding Director for Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution and prior to that served as Director of Research for Europe and Eurasia at the Atlantic Council. She has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including at the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. She also serves on the board of the Free Russia Foundation and the Institute of Modern Russia.

Polyakova holds a Ph.D. and MA in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Emory University.

Twitter: @apolyakova

Peter Pomerantsev

Peter Pomeranzev is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Agora Institute, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarisation. 

His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burn Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. 

His new book, This Is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019, and won the Gordon Burn Prize. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Anastasiya Ryabchuk

Anastasiya Ryabchuk received her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and her PhD from Kyiv National University, co-supervised with Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She held post-doctoral research fellowships at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, George Washington University, and the University of Johannesburg. Ryabchuk is Associate Professor in Sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where she teaches courses in Urban sociology, Social Problems, and Qualitative Research methods. She is a co-founding editor of Commons/Spilne: journal of social critique and Medusa publishing house. Her academic interests include anthropology of humanitarianism and discursive construction of poverty and vulnerability. She is currently conducting research on humanitarian development in frontline communities of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

Benjamin L. Schmitt

Benjamin Schmitt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Development Scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. At Harvard, Benjamin focuses on the development of instrumentation and infrastructure for next-generation Antarctic experimental cosmology facilities at the South Pole. For this work, Schmitt traveled to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica in early 2020 and is a recipient of the United States Antarctica Service Medal. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank in Washington, D.C. Benjamin is a Fellow with the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies "Rethinking Diplomacy" program focused on advancing research toward better integrating practitioners of science and technology into the senior U.S. national security and foreign policy enterprise, with a particular focus on space diplomacy issues. From 2015-2019 Benjamin served as European Energy Security Advisor at the U.S. Department of State where he advanced diplomatic engagement vital to the energy and national security interests of the Transatlantic community, with a focus on supporting the resilience of NATO’s Eastern Flank as it faced Russian malign energy activities and disinformation campaigns. Schmitt regularly publishes Transatlantic national security analysis, including with Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Harvard International Review, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and Center for European Policy Analysis, and is a regular guest commenting on Transatlantic national security issues for Deutsche Welle television. 

Viktoriya Sereda

Viktoriya Sereda is a sociologist who has been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since 2020. Prior to her current position, she taught sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University beginning in 2015, and at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv starting in 2002. In the Spring semester of 2021, she was also a visiting lecturer at the University of Basel. Sereda has either led or participated in over 30 sociological research projects on Ukrainian society and its regional dimensions. From 2011 to 2017, she was the head of the sociological team for the project “Region, Nation and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine” organized by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In 2016–2017 and 2019–2020 she was the MAPA Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where she developed a digital atlas of social changes in Ukraine after the Euromaidan.

Twitter: @SeredaViktoria

Oxana Shevel

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University where her research and teaching focuses on Ukraine and the post-Soviet region. Her current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; comparative memory politics; church-state relations in Ukraine; and the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas. 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 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. Shevel’s research has appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, and Slavic Review, as well as in edited volumes. She is a member of PONARS Eurasia scholarly network, a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and an associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She currently serves as President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).

Twitter: @OxanaShevel

Gerard Toal

Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is a Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He is the author of over a hundred peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters on critical geopolitics, territorial conflicts (mostly in post-communist contexts), US foreign policy, de facto states, media, and discourse analysis. He is the recipient of multiple research grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). His last book Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus (Oxford University Press) won the International Studies Association’s ENMIA Distinguished Book Award in 2019. He is currently finishing a book on climate change and geopolitics.

Twitter: Toal_CritGeo

Nariman Ustaiev

A foreign and security policy specialist, Nariman Ustaiev is experienced in working at the intersection of public and private sectors with an emphasis on democracy and human rights. 

He is co-founder and Director of the Gasprinski Institute for Geostrategy. He is also an external advisor for the Committee on Human Rights, Deoccupation and Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories in Donetsk, Luhansk Regions and Autonomous Republic of Crimea, National Minorities and Interethnic Relations of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. 

Previously he had worked for governmental institutions responsible for Ukraine’s security policy, namely the National Security and Defense Council, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and the State Service of Ukraine for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol. 

He graduated from the Diplomatic Academy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and Kyiv-Mohyla Business School. 

Twitter: @NarimanUstaiev

Amb. Marie Yovanovitch

Marie Yovanovitch is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University. Previously, she served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (2016-2019), the Republic of Armenia (2008-2011) and the Kyrgyz Republic (2005-2008). She also served as the Dean of the School of Language Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State and as the Deputy Commandant and International Advisor at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, National Defense University. Earlier she served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, where she coordinated policy on European and global security issues. Before that, she was the bureau’s Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for issues related to the Nordic, Baltic, and Central European countries. 

In 2003-2004, Ambassador Yovanovitch was the Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Prior to that, she was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. Within the Department of State, Ambassador Yovanovitch has worked on the Russia desk, the Office of European Security Affairs, and the Operations Center. She has also worked overseas at the U.S. Embassies in Moscow, London, Ottawa, and Mogadishu. 

A Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service, Ambassador Yovanovitch has earned the Senior Foreign Service Performance Award eight times and the State Department’s Superior Honor Award on nine occasions. She is also the recipient of two Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and the Secretary’s Diplomacy in Human Rights Award. In 2020, Georgetown University granted Ambassador Yovanovitch the Trainor Award for Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy, the University of Indiana granted her the inaugural Richard G. Lugar Award, and Pen America honored her with the 2020 PEN/Benenson Courage Award. In 2021, she received the Morgenthau Award from the Armenian Assembly of America. 

Ambassador Yovanovitch is a graduate of Princeton University where she earned a BA in History and Russian Studies. She studied at the Pushkin Institute and received an MS from the National Defense University.