Daria V. Ezerova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at Davidson College. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary Russian culture and society, with a specific focus on spatial theory, ideology, and Putin-era literature and cinema. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. She is currently working on a book that examines how political power shaped the representation of space and time after the collapse of the USSR. She is also the President of the ASEEES Working Group on Cinema and Television. In spring 2019, she accepted a position as Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
Hannes Grandits is Professor for South-East European History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He specializes in the history of southeast and central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with emphasis on a comparative perspective. This comparative approach starts by focusing on the societal changes that are explored by concentrating on a diverse set of units of analysis, such as families, communities, and the development of the welfare state. He was a co-founder of the project “Phantom Borders in Central and Eastern Europe.”
Neringa Klumbytė is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University. She is co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania (2018), and co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85 (2012). Her research on Soviet and post-1991 Lithuania have explored Europeanization, sovereignty and nationalism, electoral politics, historical and social justice, memories of WWII, nostalgia for socialism, and political marketing. She is currently working on a book on Soviet official humor. She was the editor of the Council for European Studies Journal Perspectives on Europe in 2013–15.
Claudia Kraft is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, with previous positions in Germany at the University of Siegen (2011–18) and the University of Erfurt (2005–11). Her research focusses on comparative European history, gender history, the history of state socialism, and the transnational legal history of east central Europe. She was a founding member of the project “Phantom Borders,” and is currently conducting a joint research project with the University of Warsaw on “Room for Maneuver in State Socialism.”
Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian art and formerly taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. She is the author of Picturing Russia's Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Dietmar Müller is a senior researcher and project leader at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, Germany, and one of the founding members of the project consortium “Phantom Borders in Eastern Europe.” Previous positions included Visiting Professor for Cultural Studies in Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Leipzig, and Postdoc Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena. His Research focus is on nation-building and minorities in eastern Europe, and the economic history of rural areas. He has numerous publications on questions of property and legal systems in eastern Europe.
Vasiliki Neofotistos is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches courses on, among other topics, political anthropology, the anthropology of war and peace, and postsocialism. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University (2003), and has previously taught in the Department of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America. Neofotistos is the author of The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in Modern Macedonia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and numerous articles on nationalism and the politics of identity in the Balkans.
Liene Ozoliņa is a Course Tutor at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she teaches political sociology and social theory. She has studied reconfigurations of political subjectivity in post-Soviet Latvia via ethnographic case studies of welfare system reform, civic education, and democratic accountability initiatives. She has published in the British Journal of Sociology and East European Politics and Societies. Her first book, Politics of Waiting: Workfare, Post-Soviet Austerity and the Ethics of Freedom, has recently been published by Manchester University Press as part of a new series Political Ethnography.
Viktoria Paranyuk holds a PhD in Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. She is currently working on a book that explores the aesthetics of sincerity and realism in the cinema of the Soviet Thaw. Her other research focuses on the intersections of Russian visual culture and science in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the fall of 2019 Viktoria will be teaching in the Film Department at Brooklyn College.
Nancy Ries is Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies, Director of the Division of University Studies, and Christian A. Johnson Chair in Liberal Arts Studies at Colgate University. Her interests include social and cultural transformation in Russia: poverty, crime, corruption, elites, mafia; comparative anthropology of post-socialism; violence and war in comparative perspective; social theory of weaponry. She is the author of Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (1997). Her recent articles include “Ukraine and Russia: The Agency of War” in Cultural Anthropology (2014) and “The Broken Nuclear Taboo” in Leviathan Journal (2016).
Thomas Serrier, a fellow of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study in 2018–19, is a historian and Germanist, with a research focus on German cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the transnational history of European borders and European memories. He is a professor for contemporary German history and culture at the University of Lille in France and a researcher at IRHiS (Université de Lille/CNRS). He was a founding member of the project “Phantom Borders in Central and Eastern Europe.” In 2016–17, he was head of the project “The location of Europe: Shared and divided memories in a global age,” supported by the Foundation Volkswagen and the European University Viadrina Frankfurt(Oder).
Valeria Sobol is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (2009); and a co-editor (with Mark Steinberg) of the volume Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (2011). She has recently completed her second book project on the Russian imperial Gothic with a focus on Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltics as uncanny imperial spaces.
Béatrice von Hirschhausen is research director at the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Member of the Research Unit (Géographie-cités” in Paris, France), and Associate Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on the “longue durée” in central and eastern Europe, seen from a geographical perspective. At the Centre Marc Bloch, she was head of a research consortium “Phantom Borders in Central and Eastern Europe,” financed by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF, 2010–17).
Catherine Wanner is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1998), Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (2007), which won four best book prizes and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, co-editor with Mark Steinberg of Religion, Morality and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (2008), editor of State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (2012) and editor of three collections of essays on resistance and renewal during the Maidan protests. She is currently writing a book on the politics of religion, faith, and belonging in Ukraine and Russia.
Tanya Zaharchenko is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on cultural memory and trauma, identity, nation(hood), borders and boundaries, and narratives of conflict. She was the 2015 Albert Einstein Fellow in Germany, and is the author of Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine (2016). Her work has appeared in international journals and edited volumes. She holds a PhD in Slavonic studies from the University of Cambridge (2014) and blogs at memoryidentity.wordpress.com.
