Biogramy

Biographies

Daniel Baric

Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Studies at Sorbonne University. His research focuses on intercultural contacts in Central Europe and the Balkans, particularly in cultural transfers between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. He is also a literary translator. Daniel studied history, Germanic, Hungarian, and Slavic languages and literature in Paris, Berlin, and Budapest and holds a teaching qualification in German. He lectured at the University of Tours, teaching German. He teaches Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian language and literature and translation studies at Sorbonne University. Some of his recent publications include The French Institute of Zagreb: Fundamentals and Contexts of Cultural Mediation with Edi Miloš (2023), Carl Patsch: Archaeology of a Life between Bohemia and Bosnia (2023).

Jérôme Bazin

Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of Paris-Est Créteil. He completed his doctorate in the history of painting in East Germany and has published works on artistic exchanges between communist countries. Currently, he is researching rural architecture in Poland and Bulgaria, combining social history and the history of images and buildings. His research is based on written archives, mainly from government departments, and the analysis of images. In his latest project, he works extensively with various kinds of photographs. His diverse fields of study allow him to reflect on the Eastern European space.

Additionally, he has experience in curatorial activities and served as co-curator of the exhibition “Cold Revolution” at the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw in 2021, focusing on art in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. He is also assisting in preparing an exhibition dedicated to landscapes created during the World War II.

Some bibliographical references: https://crhec.u-pec.fr/membres/membres-titulaires/bazin-jerome

William Berthomière

Deputy Scientific Director Europe and International at the CNRS Humanities & Social Sciences cooperation. He is a Social Geographer and Senior Scientist at the CNRS (Unit of Research PASSAGES). He obtained his PhD in Geography from the University of Poitiers in 2000 and received French accreditation to supervise Doctoral research in 2012. Over the years, he has received the Lavoisier Post-Doctoral Fellowship funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the French Research Center of Jerusalem. In 2004, he was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal. William Berthomière has held positions as the director of Migrinter (2006-11) and co-director of the Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (REMi). His current scientific activities focus on the diversity of migrations in Israel, the dynamics of international migrations in rural areas, and specifically on the concepts of diaspora and migrant territoriality, as well as the notions of public space and presence. In addition to his research, William Berthomière is also working on the use and status of fieldwork photography in scientific production in the social sciences.

Pascal Bonnard

Holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po in France. In 2015, He became an Assistant Professor at Jean Monnet University in Saint-Étienne. He is a member of the Triangle Laboratory and serves as a co-editor with Laurent Coumel for the Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest. His primary research areas include studying Eastern Bloc development workers in Arab and African countries during the communist era and the circulation and transfer of norms and knowledge in Europe and its neighbouring regions. Additionally, his research focuses on building expertise on the European Union’s neighbours, European integration, EU enlargement, and neighbourhood policy.

Some bibliographical references: triangle.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article5187

Philippe Bourmaud

Director of the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA) since 2022. He is also an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, where he is a member of the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA). His research focuses on the social history of medicine and social issues in the Near East since the 19^th century, interreligious interactions and festivals, and the history of expertise in the League of Nations mandates. His recent publications include “In partibus fidelium”. Missions du Levant et connaissance de l’Orient chrétien (XIXe-XXIe siècles) edited with Marie Levant, Séverine Gabry-Thienpont, Karène Sanchez Summerer and Norig Neveu.

Igor Iwo Chabrowski

Holds a PhD (2013) from the European University Institute. He is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw (since 2018). Previously, he worked at the University of Oxford (2013-14) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2015-18). From September 2024 until January 2025, Igor Chabrowski will be a Part-Time Professor at the Department of History of the European University Institute.

His research concentrates on late Qing and modern Chinese history, the history of Thailand, and global history, primarily focused on China and Southeast Asia and the history of relations between Poland and China, which he analyses through the perspective of global communism. Igor Chabrowski published two books on Chinese cultural and social history – Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs (2015) and Ruling the Stage: Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People’s Republic (2022) as well as several articles in Modern China, Journal of World History, Journal of Chinese History. Currently, he is a Principal Investigator of the National Science Centre (Poland) financed grant titled “The Foothold: China, Southeast Asia, and the Global Revolution at the Margins, 1945-1954” (OPUS-24, nr 2022/47/B/HS3/02745).

Mateusz Chmurski

Director of the French Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) in Prague since 2022. He is an Associate Professor of Polish and Central European Literature at the Sorbonne University and co-director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Central Europe (CIRCE, UMR 8224 EUR’ORBEM, with Clara Royer, 2018-2022). He studied Polish literature, art history, and Slavic studies at the Warsaw and Sorbonne Universities. He was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2017-2018) and an International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles (2016-2017). He was twice awarded the START Fellowship of the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP, 2015, 2016).

His recent publications include the monograph Journal, fiction et identité(s). Modernités littéraires d’Europe centrale (1880-1920) à travers les œuvres de Géza Csáth, Karol Irzykowski et Ladislav Klíma (2018, Polish ed. 2023), anthologies La Voïvodine, une région centre-européenne et ses littératures (2022), Le Démon du consentement et autres textes (2019), edited with Dominik Tatarka; and Problemy literatury i kultury modernizmu w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej (1867-1918) (2017).

Sophie Coeuré

Professor of Contemporary History at the Université Paris Cité (Research Centre ICT – Les Europes dans le monde / CERCEC-EHESS) – Academic Chair in the Democracy Hub, Circle U. European University Alliance – Vice-President of the Institut d’études slaves, Paris.

Email: sophie.coeure@u-paris.fr

Her research and teaching interests include modern Russian and European diplomatic, cultural and intellectual history, communism in a globalised world, cultural and scientific diplomacy, Western reception of the Soviet experience, transnational dissent, displaced cultural property during and after World War II, and comparative political and cultural history of archives. Concerning the “Conflict, Memory, Resilience” research theme, her current research and projects all include an interdisciplinary perspective and focus on:

* Archives as subjects and actors in conflicting histories and narratives. Displaced archives, disempowered archives and “archival extractivism”, counter-archives, decolonisation of socialist archival systems.

* Transnational mobilisations for democracy and human rights (19th-21st century), information flows, levels of engagement

* Cross-representations of “Western” and “East-Central” Europe in the academic and public spheres, the political use of history and memory.

See the French programme DISSINVENT (DISSidences de l’Est en exil: INVentaire, histoires, pratiques documentaires) and the COST Action New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent – NEP4Dissent.

Anna Colin-Lebedev

Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Paris Nanterre. She has directed the Franco-Belarusian Centre for European Studies in Minsk and conducted research in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Her current work focuses on combatants in Ukraine.

Jawad Daheur

He studied social sciences and history at the ENS Paris-Saclay (formerly Cachan) and the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Strasbourg. Since 2018, he has been a CNRS researcher at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian, East European and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC). His research focuses on the economic, social, and environmental history, particularly the interactions between human societies and nature in Central Europe during the 19th century, with a specific interest in the German-speaking regions (Prussia, Austria-Hungary) and Poland. He explores these issues through the lens of economic exploitation, international trade, and their impact on the environment and human-non-human relations. Furthermore, his research delves into the socio-political dynamics of resource control and the geography of material flows. He also investigates the social aspects of production, consumption, and trade.

In 2022, he published a dossier titled “Extractive Peripheries in Europe: Quest for Resources and Changing Environments (15th -20th Centuries)” in the Journal Global Environment (vol. 15, no. 2). Additionally, he is currently coordinating a collective work on the environmental history of the Habsburg Empire from the mid-19th century to 1918, which is scheduled to be published by Berghahn Books in 2025.

Laure Delcour

Associate Professor of International Relations and EU Studies, Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris). She has taught EU external action, the ENP and EU-Russia relations at Sciences Po Paris, Sciences-Po Strasbourg, INALCO Paris and MGIMO (Moscow). Her research interests focus on the diffusion and reception of EU norms and policies in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy, as well as region-building processes in Eurasia. She has acted as coordinator or researcher in several EU and French-funded research projects on these topics. She is currently conducting a Franco-Austrian research project (ANR-FWF) on civil society participation in the policy-making process in the EU’s neighbourhood and a Horizon Europe project on policy perspectives for the Eastern Neighbourhood and the Western Balkans. She published her research in Democratisation, Journal of European Integration, Contemporary Politics, Contemporary Security Policy, Problems of Post-Communism, European Security and Eastern European Politics, and several monographs and edited volumes.

Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux

CNRS research director emeritus at the Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH) at the EHESS. She was a founding member and first director (1990-1994) of the the French Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) in Prague and a member of its Scientific Council (2001-2012). Ducreux served as a member of the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Commission of the Czech Republic (1998-2023) and President of the International Scientific Council of the University of Prague (2015-2023). In 2009, she received an honorary doctorate from Charles University in Prague. Her research centres on the history of religion, society, and politics in the Habsburg Monarchy. Additionally, she is interested in the identity constructions and nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Her recent publications include Kultura-Zbožnost-Symbolická politika. Proměny společnosti ve Střední Evropě v 17. a 18. Století [Culture-Religion-Symbolic politics. Changes in society in Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries] (2023) and Borders, Thresholds, Boundaries: A Social History of Categorisations (2020).

Maciej Falski

Assistant Professor at the Institute of West and South Slavonic Studies (ISZiP) at the University of Warsaw. He researches the symbolic sphere of the post-Yugoslav area; he is particularly interested in the cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Croatia and the formation of local communities. He studies urban space from the perspective of social and cultural history and the formation of imagined communities in this complex area. She heads the Studio of the Post-Yugoslavian Area, an interdisciplinary discussion and research platform at ISZiP. Since 2012, she has been a member of the editorial board (first as secretary, now as deputy editor-in-chief) of the annual journal Colloquia Humanistica, published by the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Ronan Hervouet

Professor of Sociology at the University of Bordeaux and member of the Centre Émile Durkheim. He is currently working on the experiences of Belarusian exiles who left the country after the massive repression following the 2020 riots. He has recently published La Révolution suspendue. Les Bélarusses contre l’État autoritaire (2023). He is also coordinating a research project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche: EXILEST (Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian exiles after the invasion of Ukraine. Politicisations, interactions, solidarities and tensions). For further information: https://exilest.hypotheses.org/

Kseniya Homel-Ficenes

Graduated from the Institute of International Relations and Social Prevention and Resocialisation at the University of Warsaw. She is a PhD student at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw and an associate researcher at the Centre for Migration Research. Her research interests include social and political mobilisation of diasporas, labour market participation, and entrepreneurship of people with migration experience, especially women, as well as gender aspects of discrimination and power relations.

She is currently conducting two research projects on the entrepreneurship of migrant women: NCN Preludium 21 ‘Strategies for achieving agency in the masculinised world of business: a sociological analysis of entrepreneurial trajectories of female migrants in Poland’ (2022/45/N/HS6/01241) (2023-2026) and IDUB CESS ‘Business in a New Country: Strategies of female migrants and entrepreneurial support infrastructure in Poland and Italy” (2024).

Kseniya Homel-Ficenes has collaborated with think tanks, NGOs, and social initiatives, including ODI, the Institute of Public Affairs, the Association of Legal Intervention, the Inicjatywa Dom Otwarty Foundation, and others.

Marta Jaroszewicz

Assistant Professor at the Centre of Migration Research (since October 2019). She is the principal investigator of the projects “Securitisation (de-securitisation) of migration on the example of Ukrainian migration to Poland and internal migration in Ukraine” (funded by the National Science Centre) and “Mobility, migration and the COVID-19 epidemic: governing emergencies in Lithuania and Poland (EMERG LT-PL)” (funded by the National Science Centre under the DAINA 2 programme). In the past, she was a long-term researcher at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), where she held the position of senior research fellow, department head and project team leader, among others. In 2017-2019, she was a team leader in a Horizon 2020-funded project, “EU-STRAT (The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries: An Inside-Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment”. She defended her PhD in 2008. Previously, she was a project manager for the International Organisation for Migration (Mission in Ukraine) and a seconded national expert at the European Commission (Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations). Her research interests include links between migration and security, critical security studies, and migration policies in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood and Eurasia.

Luba Jurgenson

Luba Jurgenson is currently full Professor at the Department of Slavic Studies of Sorbonne-University and director of the research center Eur’ORBEM, “Cultures and Societies of Eastern, Balkan and Center Europe” (CNRS/Sorbonne), vice-president of Memorial-France. Her main research area is: representations and memory of mass violence in Eastern and Central Europe (20e century). His current work focuses, among other things, on the traces of violence in the landscape of Central and Eastern Europe (a collective dossier forthcoming, a documentary film and a monograph in preparation). Her most recent book publications include: Quand nous nous sommes réveillés. Nuit du 24 février 2022 : invasion de l’Ukraine (2023) ; Le Semeur d’yeux. Sentiers de Varlam Chalamov (2022) ; Lo Speccio del Gulag in Francia e in Italia, with Claudia Pieralli (2019).

Dorota Jurkiewicz-Eckert

M.A. Assistant at the Centre for European Studies, University of Warsaw. She is an art historian interested in European studies and international relations. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw and completed a post-graduate program at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her primary academic focus is on EU cultural policy, EU cultural heritage, the role of cultural heritage in EU external relations, international cultural relations, Polish and EU cultural diplomacy, and the history of European culture. She serves as the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Group at the University of Warsaw-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Secretary of the International Cultural Relations Section of the Polish Society for International Studies (PTSM), and she is a member of the Polish Society for European Studies (PTSE) and the Association of Art Historians.

Anna Kobylińska

Assistant Professor at the Institute of Western and Southern Slavic Studies (ISZiP) at the University of Warsaw. She is a cultural and literary scholar and a Slavicist specialising in Slovak culture and intercultural relations in the (post-)Habsburg and Central European regions. She conducts most of her research from an interdisciplinary perspective. She is particularly interested in the strategies of the entry of so-called small cultures into modernity, as well as the question of the visibility of peripheral phenomena and cultural phenomena resulting from the tension between the sphere of ideas and social practices. She has led the Group for the Study of Slavic Cultures in the Habsburg Monarchy since its inception. She collaborates on various projects with researchers from the Slovak Academy of Sciences. For her monograph, Tropem Hermesa. Przypadek słowackiego księdza, myśliciela i literata Jonáša Záborskiego (2012) (On the trail of Hermes. The Case of the Slovak Priest, Thinker and Writer Jonáš Záborski), she was awarded the prize of the Slavic Foundation operating at the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious three-year ministerial fellowship for outstanding young researchers. She is a member of the Polish-Slovak Commission of Historians. In addition to her team projects, she is developing research on specific forms of cultural heritage transmission of so-called small cultures using the example of Slovak literature and Slovak cultural philosophy on the threshold of modernity.

Anna Konieczna

Holds a PhD in Contemporary History from Sciences Po. She is a research fellow at the Center for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw. She has previously held research positions such as the Deakin Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and Nuclear History Research Fellow at Monash South Africa University. She taught history and international relations at Sciences Po, Paris-Est Creteil University and the Catholic Institute in Paris. Her research focuses on the history of French foreign and security policy during the Fifth Republic, notably France’s relations with African states. Currently, she is working on a research project about the history of the French solidarity movement against apartheid in South Africa. One of her recent publications is “A Global History of anti-apartheid: ‘Forward to Freedom’ in South Africa” (2019), which she edited with Rob Skinner.

Marcin Kula

Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw. He is a historian specialising in the history of Latin America and the recent history of Poland. He studied at the EHESS in the academic year 1963/64 and was later invited several times as a visiting professor or guest by the EHESS and/or the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He published two books on Polish French contacts: Closer to Paris than to Moscow (about Polish historians under communism) and Unexpected Friends (on the help given by French families to Polish families after the declaration of a state of war in Poland in 1981). She is now interested in contacts between history and sociology as research disciplines.

Ivanna Kyliushyk

Social researcher with a PhD in political science. Her dissertation was on the rights and political participation of foreigners in Poland. She graduated from Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University (Ukraine) and the University of Warsaw (Poland). Member of the Centre for Research on Social Change and Human Mobility (CRASH) at Kozminski University. Her research interests include Ukrainian migration, women’s migration, the relationship between state and international migration, political inclusion and participation of migrants, their social integration and qualitative research methods.

Aleksander Łupienko

Professor at the T. Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the cultural history of urban space in the long nineteenth century, including questions of the functioning of public and private space, the multiculturalism of Galician cities, urban modernisation and conservation discourses, and, more recently, urban communities and their cultures of memory. For his book Kamienice czynszowe Warszawy 1864-1914 [Tenement Houses] (2015) he was awarded the Klio History Prize (2016). He is the author and editor of books and articles on Central and Eastern European cities, the organiser of a series of conferences on urban history in the broadest sense, a member of the European Association for Urban History, and the manager and executor of numerous research grants. He is currently leading a project on Galician Lviv (until 1914).

Claire Madl

The Deputy Director of the French Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) in Prague holds a PhD from the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. Her research focuses on the history of the book and the practices of the written word in the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This period marks a significant shift in historiography between the Enlightenment and national affirmation. Additionally, she has studied the introduction of compulsory schooling in the Habsburg Monarchy (1774, 1777) as a crucial moment in the affirmation of reading as a “total social fact” and the spread of “reading for all”.He published numerous books and academic articles, most recently Buchwesen in Böhmen 1749-1848. Kommentiertes Verzeichnis der Drucker, Buchhändler, Buchbinder, Kupfer- und Steindrucker. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz (2019). with Petr Píša and Michael Wögerbauer. Na cestě k výborně zřízenému knihkupectví. Protagonisté, podniky a sítě knižního trhu v Čechách (1749-1848). [On the way to a “well-functioning book market”. Networks, firms and protagonists in the Bohemian book market. 1749-1848]. (2019).

Małgorzata Molęda-Zdziech

Head of the Department of Political Studies at the Institute of International Studies of the Collegium of Economics and Social Sciences of the Warsaw School of Economics. She is also the Plenipotentiary of the Rector of the Warsaw School of Economics for cooperation with the European Union. Her expertise lies in sociology and political science, and she holds a habilitated doctorate of social sciences in the field of political science and administration. In the past, she served as the Deputy Director of the Polish-French European Studies Programme at the Warsaw School of Economics / Sciences Po from 1998 to 2001, and as the Director of the PolSCA Science Promotion Office of the Polish Academy of Sciences from November 2017 to March 2020. Her research interests include communication, media, mediatisation of public life, as well as lobbying and interest groups at the national and European levels. She is the author and co-author of numerous publications on lobbying, communication, and media, including “Celebrity Time: Mediatisation of Public Life” (2013) and “American Elections in the Era of Post-Truth” (2018) which she co-authored with J. Misiuna and S. Łubiarz. Furthermore, she is a member of the Polish Society of Social Communication, the Polish Sociological Association, the Polish Society of Political Sciences, and the Board of the France-Poland Association. She is also honored with the French Order of the Academic Palm (Chevalier des Palmes Académiques).

Jan Olaszek

Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Senior Specialist at the Historical Research Department of the Institute of National Remembrance. He specialises in the history of the democratic opposition and the underground publishing movement in communist Poland. He is working on a biography of Roman Zimand, a Polish intellectual who changed from a fanatical Stalinist to a fundamental anti-communist.

Etienne Peyrat

Historian, Director of Sciences Po Lille since March 2024. He studied at Ecole Normale Superieure and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He obtained his doctorate at Sciences Po (2015). He worked as a communications and events officer at the French Institute in Ukraine. He has taught history at Galatasaray University (Turkey), Sciences Po and the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France (UPHF). In 2017, he joined Sciences Po Paris as a research associate at the Centre d’histoire (CHSP) and the University of Lille as a researcher at the Institut de recherches historiques du Septentrion (IRHIS). Etienne Peyrat is a historian of Eurasia with a particular interest in imperial diplomacy and domestic factors in international relations and borderlands. He has written several articles on the relations between Russia or the Soviet Union and the Middle East, particularly Turkey and Iran. His recent publications include Histoire du Caucase au XXe siècle (2020, trans. In Chinese, 2023) and the edited volumes The Russian Revolution in Asia from Baku to Batavia (2021), edited with Yuexin Rachel Lin, Naoko Shimazu, Sabine Dullin, and La Russie et l’URSS du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours (2021), edited with Alexandre Sumpf.

Paweł Rodak

Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw, and associate professor at the Department of Slavic Studies at Sorbonne University. Formerly, he was the director of the Centre de civilisation polonaise at the Sorbonne University (2016-19). He is a member of the the Eur’ORBEM research centre (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe) and the “Genèse et autobiographie” research group (l’Institut des textes & manuscrits modernes at École Normale Supérieure in Paris). Additionally, he is a member of the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (France) and the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA Europe). He also collaborates with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he was a visiting professor in 2005 and 2013. His latest publications: Czy książki wywołują rewolucje? Szkice z historii książki, lektury i kultury piśmiennej [Do Books Make Revolutions? On the History of Books, Reading and Writing Culture] (2019); Józef Czapski. Itinéraires de verité, edited with Maria Delaperrière and Maciej Forycki (2020); Rethinking modern Polish identities: transnational encounters, edited with Agnieszka Pasieka (2023).

Kathy Rousselet

Senior Research Fellow at CERI of Sciences Po. Alumnus of the Ecole normale supérieure, Kathy Rousselet holds a Ph.D. in political science. She is an associate Fellow at the Centre d’études des monde russe, caucasien et centre-européen (EHESS). She is a member of the editorial boards of the Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest and of Archives de sciences sociales des religions. She is also a member of the scientific council of the GDR „Empire russe, URSS, monde post-soviétique” (GDRUS). Since January 2024, she has headed the “Russian Empire, USSR and post-Soviet world” research group (CNRS). Kathy Rousselet’s early work focused on religious dissidence during the Soviet era. She studied the religious transformations at work in Russia from perestroika onward, especially the development of Russian Orthodoxy. She was interested as much in the religious policy of the Russian state and in the political discourse of the hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate as in life in the parishes and religious practices. As part of a collective project on patriotism in Russia, she studied patriotic practices within the Russian Orthodox Church. She worked on the veneration of the imperial family, observing, over a period of several years, the religious processions at Ekaterinburg. One part of her research also focused on the religious memorialization of the Great Terror, particularly at Butovo in the suburbs of Moscow.

Kathy Rousselet also worked to a lesser extent on other subjects, notably on the rise of civil society in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s and, as part of a Franco-Russian research programme, on the role of informal relationships in Russian society.

Jan Szumski

Associate Professor of History. He is the head of the Research Unit on the History of Humanist and Social Thought at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a senior specialist at the Historical Research Centre of the Institute of National Remembrance. His research interests include the political, social and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, the history of the eastern territories of the former Republic of Poland, and the history of the Soviet Union and Polish-Soviet relations, with a particular focus on scientific contacts. In 2017-18, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2023, he has been a member of the Board of the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission.

Marie-Françoise Saudraix-Vajda

Assistant Professor in Modern History where she is a member of the Eur’ORBEM research centre (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe). Her research focuses on the history of the Austrian monarchy, nobility and state in Central Europe and the history of land wars in France (the Dutch War) and Central Europe (the War of the Austrian Succession, the Thirty Years’ War). She specialises in modern Hungary.

Gaëlle Tallet

Professor of Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean and Oriental Archaeology at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Since 2008, they have been the Director of the el-Deir archaeological mission in Kharga Oasis in Egypt. She is a Member of the Board of the Society of University Professors of Ancient History (SOPHAU). She serves as a Member of the editorial board of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and the Revue d’Histoire des Religions.

Gaëlle Tallet’s research interests include the archaeology of Egyptian oases during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, focusing on the adaptations and responses of the oasis communities of Kharga to environmental changes. She also studies the oasis town and village from the Late Persian to the Late Imperial periods, including local geoarchaeology, domestic and administrative spaces, temples, necropolises, archaeology of circulation and nomadism, and archaeology of the border of the Roman Empire such as fortifications and marginal economy. Additionally, her research involves a material approach to religion in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, examining interactions, acculturation, and strategies of Hellenism in Greco-Roman Egypt through objects of domestic piety and private devotion (iconography and techniques), funerary furnishings (Greco-Roman cartonnage and sarcophagi), and the transition from paganism to Christianity in the oases.

Laurent Tatarenko

Director of the Center for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw and CNRS research fellow at the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS – ENS/PSL – Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne). He specialises in Early Modern history  developping his research on the social regulations and institutional knowledge of the Uniate and Orthodox communities of Central and Eastern Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Recently, he has been studying the relationship between religious cultures and government practices in East Slavic communities. His recent publications include Une réforme orientale à l’âge baroque : les Ruthènes de la grande-principauté de Lituanie et Rome au temps de l’Union de Brest (milieu du XVIe – milieu du XVIIe siècle) (2021) and Autocephalies : l’exercice de l’indépendance dans les Églises slaves orientales (IXe-XXIe siècle) (2021) edited with Marie-Hélène Blanchet and Frédéric Gabriel.

Kinga Torbicka

Historian, political scientist. PhD in human sciences from Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University. Researcher at the Center for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw. Researcher at the Groupe d’études Géopolitiques, École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Member of the scientific network Actualité critique européenne, École Normale Supérieure, Paris and „PoSoc-19”, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Bruxelles). Associate researcher at the Europa Varietas Institute (Switzerland). Contractor of the NCN Miniatura 8 grant “Redefinition of the strategic culture of France after 1989: sources and redefinition” (2024-2025). French government scholarship holder (2019). Director of the 4EU+ project „L’Europe centrale face à la pandémie” (2020-2021). Main areas of research include security in the EU and NATO – geopolitical and military dimensions; comparative analysis of the national security systems of EU countries – in particular, the systems of Poland and France; Central and Eastern Europe; and the strategic culture of France and Europe. Latest publications: Torbicka K., „The French Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the light of the Common Security and Defense Policy of the EU – the summary”, Studia Polityczne, vol. 51, nr 3/2023, ISP PAN, Warsaw 2023: 155-172; edited volume L’Europe centrale face à la pandémie de Covid-19: de la transformation anthropologique vers la recomposition géopolitique (2022); Contested Legacies of 1989. Geopolitics, Memory and Societies in Central-Eastern Europe (2022) edited with Nicolas Maslowski.

Jana Vargovcikova

Lecturer in political science at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris. Her research focuses on transparency policies, lobbyists and lobbying, conservative mobilization in Slovakia, and state control in Central Europe after 1989. Her latest publications include: Au-delà de l’hypocrisie de la transparence: augmenter l’intelligibilité du travail de l’État, pour quoi faire? ” in Maria Fartunova-Michel, Marie-Odile Peyroux-Sissoko et Marie Rota (eds.), Transparence et fonction juridictionnelle, Institut Universitaire Varenne (2022).

Rafal Wnuk 

Researcher at the Jean-Paul II Catholic University in Lublin and Director of the World War II Museum in Gdansk. His research focuses on anti-German and anti-Soviet resistance in Central Europe during and after World War II, politics of memory, the history of totalitarian systems, and museology. She is the author of numerous books and academic articles, most recently Niezłomni czy realiści? Polskie podziemie antykomunistyczne bez Patosu [Steadfast or Realists? The Polish Anti-Communist Underground without Pathos], co-author Sławomir Poleszak (2024); Leśni Bracia. Podziemie antykomunistyczne na Litwie. Łotwie i w Estonii. 1944-1956 [Forest Brothers. The Anti-Communist Underground in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia 1944-1956] (2018).

Marcin Zaremba

Historian and sociologist and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw. His research interests encompass the social history of the Polish People’s Republic, historical sociology, and the history of emotions. He recently published a book titled Wielkie Rozczarowanie. Geneza rewolucji Solidarności [The Great Disappointment. The Genesis of the Solidarity Revolution] (2023) and is a collaborator with the weekly “Polityka”.