2023 Conference Speakers

Victoria Amelina

Victoria Amelina is a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist. She is the author of two novels, a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award, and a European Union Prize for Literature finalist for her books about contemporary Ukraine, Dom's Dream Kingdom (Dom dla Doma), and Fall Syndrome. Her works have been translated into the Polish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Croatian, and English languages. She is a founder of a literary festival in the Donetsk region in Ukraine. As of 2022, Victoria Amelina lives in Kyiv, works as a war crimes researcher, and works on a non-fiction book, War & Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.

Twitter: @vamelina

Eve Blau

Dr. Eve Blau is the Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the Graduate School of Design where she is also Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. Her research and teaching explore cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world that have experienced large-scale adjustments to new forms of polity, systemic institutional change, and economic reorganization. She is the author of several award-winning books, including Baku: Oil and Urbanism; The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934; Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe; Architecture and Cubism; and Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Eve Blau is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. In 2015 she was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize by the Republic of Austria for her contributions to the history of social movements and the innovative methods of her scholarship.

Cynthia Buckley

Dr. Cynthia Buckley is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and an Adjunct Research Professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (ISR). A social demographer, she explores how individual choices in the areas of fertility, aging, health, and migration impact social stability and demands upon states across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Publications include Finding Home; Migration and Belonging in Eurasia (Lead Editor, John Hopkins Press 2008), articles in outlets including International Migration Review, International Migration, The Gerontologist, and numerous area journals, book chapters, and multiple program and policy assessments. Her current work focuses on how various forms of structural and kinetic violence influence health and migration flows, particularly in Ukraine. A participant in the WHO health cluster for Ukraine, her research on displacement is currently supported by grants from the MINERVA program and the Norwegian Research Council.

Emily Channell-Justice

Dr. 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 (University of Toronto Press) was published in 2022, 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.

Twitter: @channelljustice

Christina E. Crawford

Dr. Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and Masse-Martin NEH Professor of Art History at Emory University. Her research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the twentieth century. Her first book, Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), follows the development of socialist urban theory and practice in three seminal industrial sites: Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv. She is co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT Press, 2023), and is currently writing a book about interwar exchanges of worker housing expertise between the U.S. and Europe using Atlanta, Georgia as a primary node. Crawford received her Ph.D. and M.Arch. from Harvard University, and her B.A. from Yale University. She was a Fulbright student in Kyiv in 2001-2002, during which she researched the emergence of post-independence Ukrainian architecture.

Twitter: @cecrawford_ 
Instagram: @christina_crawford, @emoryuniversity, @arthistoryemory, @emorycollege
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Yonah Diamond

Yonah Diamond is an international human rights lawyer at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, specializing in atrocity prevention and political prisoner advocacy. He is the principal author of the Wallenberg-New Lines expert report, An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent. He is also lead author of An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention (2021) and co-author of Cameroon's Unfolding Catastrophe: Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes Against Humanity (2019). He has lectured at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and the European Parliament’s Sakharov Fellowship Programme, and published articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Project Syndicate, Foreign Policy, Globe and Mail, Just Security, and Opinio Juris, among others.

Melinda Haring

Melinda Haring is director of stakeholder relations and social impact at the Superhumans Center 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), and 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 Eurasia Foundation, Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute, where she managed democracy assistance programs in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. 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, a member of the supervisory board of Right to Protection in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Twitter:  @superhumans_com, @aceurasia, @melindaharing 

Hasan Hasanović

Hasan Hasanović survived the Bosnian genocide but other family members did not, including his twin brother and his father. He educated hundreds of thousands of visitors for 11 years at the Memorial. He has been a keynote speaker at events in universities and schools in numerous countries and has addressed a number of Parliaments. With the support of the Scottish First Minister, he published a short memoir of his experience, Surviving Srebrenica, which has been published in Italian, Dutch, and German. Hasanović has coauthored Voices From Srebrenica: Survivor Narratives of the Bosnian Genocide. He led a number of Oral History Projects on the behalf of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Hasanović is the head of the oral history team and serves as the main interviewer. He recently curated an oral history video exhibit, "Srebrenica: Our Story," and on the behalf of the Srebrenica Memorial Center has coordinated an oral history collaboration with the Shoah foundation.

Ambassador 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 

Kristina Hook

Dr. Kristina Hook is an Assistant Professor of Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development. She is an anthropologist and scholar-practitioner specializing in civilian protection and the prevention of genocides and mass atrocities. Hook is an expert on Ukrainian national identity formation and Ukrainian-Russian relations. A former Fulbright scholar, she has conducted multiple years of fieldwork in Ukraine since 2015 and is writing a book on the Holodomor. Her analysis has appeared in Genocide Studies and Prevention, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic Council, CNN, and USA Today. Hook received her joint PhD in anthropology and peace studies from the University of Notre Dame. Previously, she served as a U.S. Department of State policy advisor for conflict stabilization and in leadership roles with several non-governmental organizations. She is a U.S. Presidential Management Fellow alumna and a non-resident fellow at the Marine Corps University’s Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare. 

Twitter: @Kristina__Hook, @kennesawstate
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Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta. A cultural anthropologist and oral historian, her research interests include Ukraine and post-socialism in Europe, diasporic identities, labor migration, and Ukrainian Canadian culture. She is the author of  Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the 20th Century (2015) and The other world, or ethnicity in action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the end of the 20th century (2011), and the co-author of Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines (2011) and Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (2015). Dr. Khanenko-Friesen is the founding editor of the Canadian Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning. Her current book project has the working title “Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers Speak Out."

Pavlo Klimkin

Pavlo Klimkin is co-founder of the Centre for National Resilience and Development and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. He holds a Master’s degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He worked as a researcher in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, before joining the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in 1993, where his main profiles were arms control and security, nuclear safety, energy security, the EU and NATO. He was head of the negotiating team for the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and the EU visa-free regime for Ukraine. He has been posted to Germany and the UK, including as Ambassador to Germany. Klimkin is a Member of the Board of the Come Back Alive foundation.

Ambassador Anton Korynevych

Dr. Anton Korynevych is an Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. He is a Ukrainian lawyer specializing in public international law, international humanitarian and international criminal law and the Agent of Ukraine before the International Court of Justice in the Allegations of Genocide case (since 26 February 2022). 

Korynevych served as Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (25 June 2019 – 25 April 2022). He is coordinating the issue of the establishment of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine on the Ukrainian side. 

Korynevych holds a position of Associate Professor of the International Law Department of the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (since 1 July 2016 onwards). He earned his Ph.D. in international law in 2011 in Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Olena Lennon

Dr. Olena Lennon is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science and National Security at the University of New Haven, where she teaches such courses as the U.S. Foreign & Defense Policy and International Relations. Formerly a Fulbright scholar from Ukraine, and most recently a scholar at Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., she has dedicated her research to the study of conflict management and identity politics in Eastern Europe, focused on the domestic and foreign policy of Ukraine. An eastern Ukraine native, Lennon has been a regular participant in scholarly and media forums related to issues in Ukraine, facilitating a more informed and objective analysis of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. She also serves as an election observer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and has completed several election observation missions in the region. Her work appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Demokratizatsiya, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and other outlets. 

Twitter: @olenalennon

Oleksandra Matviichuk

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a Kyiv-based human rights lawyer and civil society leader. She leads the non-profit human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Award in Oslo in 2022, and also coordinates the work of the initiative group Euromaidan SOS. The activities of the Center for Civil Liberties are aimed at protecting human rights and establishing democracy in Ukraine and the OSCE region. The organization develops legislative changes, exercises public oversight over law enforcement agencies and judiciary, conducts educational activities for young people and implements international solidarity programs. Its “Tribunal for Putin” initiative has documented 27,137 war crimes committed by Russians since February 24, 2022.

The Euromaidan SOS initiative was created in response to the brutal dispersal of a peaceful student rally in Kyiv on November 30, 2013. During the Revolution of Dignity, several thousand volunteers provided round-the-clock legal and other aid to persecuted people throughout the country. Since the end of the protests and beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the initiative has been monitoring political persecution in occupied Crimea, documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the hybrid war in the Donbas, and conducting the “LetMyPeopleGo” international campaign to release political prisoners detained by the Russian authorities.

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. In 2016, she received the Democracy Defender Award for "Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights" from missions to the OSCE. She received the 2017 Ukraine’s Woman of Courage Award from U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie L. Yovanovitch, the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award, and the 2022 Right Livelihood Award. Matviichuk was named one of the top 25 most influential women in the world by The Financial Times.

Twitter: @avalaina

Rahul Mehrotra

Dr. Rahul Mehrotra is the founder principal of RMA Architects and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014 and extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter? Mehrotra’s most recent books are titled Working in Mumbai (2020) and The Kinetic City and other essays ( 2021). The former a reflection on his practice evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai. The second book presents Mehrotra’s writings over the last thirty years and illustrates his long-term engagement with and analysis of urbanism in India. This work has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city which Mehrotra calls the Kinetic City.

Uliana Movchan

Dr. Uliana Movchan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. She has conducted research at the University of Tübingen (Germany); the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University); Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Toronto); Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna; and the University of California, San Diego. She also serves as a project manager and expert on projects funded by international foundations such as the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and the International Visegrad Fund. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Serhii Plokhii

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. His interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of, among others, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters (W.W. Norton, 2022); 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).

Joachim von Puttkamer

Dr. Joachim von Puttkamer is a historian of Eastern Europe and Director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. From 1994 to 2002, he was an assistant professor of Modern and Eastern European History at the Albert Ludwig University Freiburg. His research focuses on the contemporary history of communism, post-communist transformations, and the politics of history in Central and Eastern Europe. He has served as series and volume co-editor of the four-volume Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. His most recent monograph addresses the history of police brutality in socialist Poland. 

Vladyslav Rashkovan

Since February 2017, Vladyslav Rashkovan has been a member of the International Monetary Fund Executive Board. As an Alternate Executive Director, he represents Ukraine and 15 other European countries.

Prior to the IMF, Rashkovan had a prominent banking career, serving as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ukraine, and being responsible for the banking sector reforms and central bank transformation. Before joining the NBU in 2014, he was the Chief Financial Officer of UniCredit Bank in Ukraine, also being engaged in leadership of the Group turnaround projects in Central and Eastern Europe.

Since the Russia’ invasion of Ukraine, Rashkovan has been at the center of many international projects to provide financial support to Ukraine and plan its post-war reconstruction and modernization. He also serves as a member of the International Advisory Panel for the National Recovery Council.

Kateryna Shynkaruk

Dr. Kateryna Shynkaruk is a Senior Lecturer at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington, D.C., where she teaches courses in East European Politics and Culture in International Politics. Her research interests cover the East European region in global politics, Ukraine’s foreign and security policy, and the role of ideas and culture in International Relations. Her recent publication is Swiss Model of Partial Integration with the European Union: What’s Applicable for Ukraine? (New Europe Center, 2021).

Since 2016, she has been teaching courses on Ukraine’s Foreign Policy and International Relations Theory as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. She is also an Associated Fellow of the Analytical Center of Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2013-2020, she worked as a Political Analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and received several high-level awards from the Department of State. In 2011-2013, she was a team leader for Ukraine in a cross-country research project, the European Integration Index for Eastern Partnership Countries. She received her Ph.D. in Global Political Affairs (2011) from National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. 

Twitter: @katerynashn
LinkedIn: kateryna-shynkaruk

Tamila Tasheva

Tamila Tasheva was appointed in April 2022 by President Zelensky to the position of Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, previously serving as the Deputy Permanent Representative. 

The Mission of the President of Ukraine in Crimea headed by Tamila Tasheva performs the functions of the Office of the Crimean Platform. Currently, the Office is working on tasks related to the first steps after de-occupation, particularly issues of responsibility (amnesty, lustration, etc.), property rights, personnel reserve, and citizenship. The team has also developed a strategy for the economic recovery of Crimea after de-occupation.

Tasheva is a co-founder and long-term coordinator of CrimeaSOS, one of the most effective human rights organizations in Ukraine dealing with the topic of temporarily occupied Crimea. She is a human rights activist and one of the Crimean Tatar young generation leaders. Tasheva has been actively involved in IDP issues, the human rights situation in Crimea, advocacy activities, and the development of the Ukrainian social protection legislation and international humanitarian law regarding the temporarily occupied territories. She also has broad experience in the civil society sector, with a special emphasis on culture and education. 

In 2019, Tasheva was awarded the state award of the Order of Princess Olga 3rd degree and the Polish Sergio Vieira de Mello Award.

Facebook: Representative of the President to Crimea / Tamila Tasheva

Maria Tomak

Maria Tomak is the Head of the Crimea Platform Department at the Mission of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Formerly, she was a Ukrainian human rights activist, journalist, researcher, coordinator, and co-founder of the Media Initiative for Human Rights.

After volunteering for the Euromaidan SOS initiative during Euromaidan, Maria moved on to actively participate in documenting human rights violations in eastern Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea, delivering information to Ukrainian society and the international community. In the summer of 2014, Tomak addressed cases of politically motivated arrests of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian Federation. She helped coordinate the LetMyPeopleGo campaign to free political prisoners, serving as a witness for the defense for Ukrainian prisoners Klykh and Karpiuk in the court hearing in Chechnya. Today, Tomak cooperates with Ukrainian structures to advocate for the release of Ukrainians illegally detained by Russia. She co-founded the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights and conducts journalistic investigations of human rights violations from both sides of the conflict. Tomak co-authored several documentaries dedicated to the bloodiest days on Euromaidan and the war in Donbas. 

In 2017, Tomak received a national human rights prize for her personal contribution to defending human rights in Ukraine. She has significant experience in international advocacy at the level of international intergovernmental organizations and governments. In 2020 she obtained the Master of Jurisprudence degree from the Loyola University Chicago School of Law (the Rule of Law for Development Program, located in the John Felice Rome Center, Italy). In recent years, Tomak cooperated with the USAID Human Rights in Action Program as an advocacy expert. 

In January 2022, Maria transitioned from NGO work to the governmental sector. Currently, she is the head of the Crimea Platform Department at the Mission of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which acts as the national office of the Crimea Platform.

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Konstantin Usov

Konstantin Usov is the acting Deputy Mayor of Kyiv, a position he has held since February 2021. Currently, he is in the Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program at Harvard Kennedy School.

Previously, Usov was a member of the Ukrainian parliament (2014-2019) and Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Communication and Digitalization. He represented Ukraine in the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, served as a full member of the PACE Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, and was a substitute member of the Committee on the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights.

In 2018, the Russian government sanctioned Usov for successfully pushing a derussification agenda in Ukraine and spearheading the ousting of the Russian delegation from the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe.