Judit Bodnár is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. She is the author of Fin de Millénaire Budapest (Minnesota) and co-editor of Critical Urban Studies Reader (L'Harmattan, Budapest). She has also written about cities, public space, globalization, urban theory and change, comparisons, and the politics of food.
Georgi Derluguian teaches sociology at New York University Abu Dhabi and the Higher School of Socio-Economic Studies (“Shaninka”) in Moscow. Among his books are Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-Systems Biography (2005) and Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013), co-authored with Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Randall Collins, and Craig Calhoun, and translated into fourteen languages.
Andrey Makarychev is Visiting Professor at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu. He is also guest Professor at the Center for Global Politics, Free University in Berlin and Senior Associate with CIDOB think tank in Barcelona. His previous institutional affiliations included George Mason University, the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research (ETH Zurich), and the Danish Institute of International Studies. He has co-authored two monographs: Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (2016), and Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Politica l (2017).
Christy Monet is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, currently conducting dissertation research on the figuring of the family in nineteenth-century Russian literature as constitutive of imperial Russia's engagement with liberal political thought. Her research interests include historical and comparative political thought, literary theory, and contemporary Russian politics.
Evgenia Olimpieva is a third year PhD student in Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative politics and political methodology. Her interests include authoritarian regimes and transitions, social media and protest movements, and the politics of memory.
Jacques Rupnik is Director of Research at Sciences Po (Centre de Recherches Internationales) in Paris and professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. His publications include Histoire du Parti Communiste Tchécoslovaque (1981), The Other Europe (1989), Le Printemps tchécoslovaque 1968 (1999), 1989 as a Political World Event: Democracy, Europe and the New International System (2014), Géopolitique de la démocratization, l'Europe et ses voisinages (2014), and Europe at the Crossroads (2018). He is currently working on a book about illiberalism and populism in east central Europe.
Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on the nation state, migration, labor, urbanization, and Left politics in general have signaled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking. Among his influential works are: Memory, Identity, Power: Politics in the Junglemahals, 1890–1950 (1998), The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999), and (co-authored) Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2014). His latest work is Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2017).
Darius Staliūnas is the author of Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (2007); Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars (2015); and Lithuanian Nationalism and the Vilnius Question, 1883–1940 (2015; co-author Dangiras Mačiulis). Since 2000, Staliūnas has been a Deputy Director at the Lithuanian Institute of History. His research interests include issues of Russian nationality policy, ethnic conflicts, and the problems of places of memory.
Anna Szemere is an independent cultural sociologist concerned with popular culture and media, gender, and the history of east central Europe. She earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of California San Diego. She divides her time between Portland, Oregon, and Budapest, where she has taught at different universities including CEU. She has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and the book Up from the Underground: The Culture Of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary. Currently she is working on a sociocultural and musical portrayal of the Romani-Hungarian singer Bea Palya for Continuum's global popular music series.
Susanne Wengle is Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame, with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Post-Soviet Power: State-led Development and Russia's Marketization (Cambridge, 2015) examines the political economy of newly-created electricity markets in Russia, and more generally engages with questions of how we study markets in the post-Soviet context and beyond.
Julie Wilhelmsen is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and former head of the Russia program at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. She holds a PhD in Political Science and conducts research in the fields of critical security studies, Russian foreign and security policies, the radicalization of Islam in Eurasia, and the two post-soviet Chechen wars. She heads projects aiming to facilitate research on the North Caucasus, has been editor of the journal Internasjonal Politikk, and has a wide outreach to the Norwegian public on issues related to Russia and Eurasia through frequent public talks and media comments.
Alexandra Yatsyk is Visiting Researcher at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw. She has served as a visiting fellow or a lecturer at the Uppsala Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Sweden), the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria), University of Tartu (Estonia), University of Tampere (Finland), George Washington University, and the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe at Lviv, Ukraine. She is co-author of Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political (2017) and Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nation and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (2016).
Miłosz J. Zieliński holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. He studied at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Warsaw University. His research interests focus on the role of pre-war historical legacies in today's Warmińsko-Mazurskie Voivodeship of Poland and Kaliningrad oblast of Russia. He is a career diplomat and is now working at the Polish Consulate General in Kaliningrad.
