Jessica Pisano is the founding faculty director of DEES. She teaches Politics at the the New School for Social Research in New York City and is a center associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine. She writes about contemporary and twentieth century politics and society in Eastern Europe, with a focus on rural spaces. Pisano is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell UP, 2022), which draws on long-term participant-observation research to analyze the theatrical political economies sustaining support for the Kremlin in and beyond Russia, and which change the meanings that attach to political participation. Her prize-winning book The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge UP, 2008) drew on research she conducted in villages along the Ukraine-Russia border over the course of a decade. Currently she is writing a history of property under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy on a single street in Eastern Europe between 1938 and 2014. She is the author of numerous articles, essays, and book chapters. Pisano’s recent publications include essays on ethnography and communication in wartime for Public Seminar, the timing of Russia’s full-scale invasion and the ideas and artistry of Volodymyr Zelenskyy for Politico Magazine, and Zelenskyy’s impact on Ukrainian politics in the Journal of Democracy. Her series of articles on Zelenskyy, Trump, and Putin appeared in the online Washington Post in 2019 and 2020. She has been an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is a member of the editorial board of Post-Soviet Affairs. Until February 2022, she sat on the editorial board of the Russian journal Krestianovedenie.
Ihor Andriichuk is a PhD student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. He graduated in Philosophy from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. His work on Enlightenment and decolonization has appeared in Krytyka. In 2019, he was a Global Dialogues Fellow at the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the NSSR.
Karolina Koziura is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research and a founding member of DEES. Karolina was a visiting fellow at The Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, NYU Jordan Center, and most recently at the Open Society Archives in Budapest. Her research was published in, among other places, the European Journal of Sociology and East European Politics, Societies, and Culture. Her research investigates issues of nationalism, memory, and politics of knowledge in/about Eastern Europe, and her doctoral dissertation traces the global processes of making the Holodomor as informed by the Cold War-era politics of knowledge production. Her work has appeared in East European Politics and Societies, Culture, and Ukraina Moderna, among others. She is a recipient of an American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant, a Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies research grant, and a Fulbright Award.
Nikola Ksiazek is a PhD student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. He is a graduate of the University of Vienna’s Department of Political Science (IPW), where he majored in Political Theory and Eastern European Studies. His research is focused on the role of memory and myth in populist politics in Poland. Before starting his PhD at the NSSR in 2022 he worked at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.
Lala Pop is a PhD student in Politics at The New School for Social Research. She is interested in issues of mobility and migration with a special focus on the Romani people. She is also Program Manager of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. Before coming to The New School, she worked for the American Council of Learned Societies for over seven years, managing international fellowship and grant competitions and related workshops, publications, and events in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia.
Masha Shynkarenko is a PhD Candidate in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research and a founding member of DEES. Her work focuses broadly on questions of identity and resistance. She recently defended her dissertation, which focuses on the nonviolent movement for self-determination of Crimean Tatar indigenous people. Masha was a Research Fellow at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and a Helen Darcovych Memorial Doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. She is currently starting as a Research Associate at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her published works have appeared both in academic journals, such as Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and in online outlets, such as the NYU Jordan Center Blog, Democracy Seminar, Public Seminar, Eurozine, among others.
Ágnes Szanyi is a PhD student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Before moving to New York to begin doctoral studies, she studied sociology at the University of Szeged and Central European University. She also worked at the Budapest-based contemporary art organization tranzit.hu. Her dissertation studies political and social activism among contemporary artists in two art worlds, in New York and Budapest. Drawing on extensive interviews and participant observation research, she investigates the alternative organizational structures artists create (solidarity economies, artist coops, alternative spaces) and how art activism affects the meaning of art. The study also shows how different social and political contexts affect art activism, and how activist artists imagine social change and the path to it in these different contexts. She has been a student fellow of The Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and The Curatorial Design Research Lab and is a member of the art collective BFAMFAPhD.
Malkhaz Toria is in the graduate program in Sociology at NSSR and coordinator of the Memory Studies Group at The New School. He is an associate professor of history and the director of the Memory Study Center in the Caucasus at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia). His research focuses on the politics of memory and the totalitarian past in post-Soviet and post-socialist societies; modern museology and memorial culture; and historiographical theory. He has held fellowships at Central European University, Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung and Humboldt University of Berlin, University of California Berkeley, and the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. His co-authored work on Georgian IDPs has appeared in Nationalities Papers and he has co-edited a special issue of Caucasus Survey based on a collaborative multi-year project on Georgian national identity, supported by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia.
Greg Yudin teaches political philosophy and social theory at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and is a Senior Researcher at Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology at Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics, Moscow with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of science. Currently he is working on a second PhD degree in Politics at The New School of Social Research in New York. He studies political theory of democracy with the special emphasis on public opinion polls as a technology of representation and governance in contemporary politics. He is also interested in political and economic anthropology and philosophy of human and social sciences. In 2019, he gave series of talks in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, all linked to his ongoing project Politics of Polls: Theories and Practices of Plebiscitarian Democracy. His book Public Opinion: The Power of Numbers was published in Russian by The European University Press in 2020. He has also recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Javnost (The Public) on Russian public sphere (Issue 1, 2020). He is a regular contributor to Vedomosti and Republic.
Amanda Zadorian is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College in Ohio, U.S.A and a founding member of DEES. She has previously taught at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and the Universitá Jana Amose Komenského in Prague, as well as The New School for Social Research, where she received her PhD in 2018. Her work on authoritarian urbanism and state capitalism has been published in Geoforum and The International Journal of Public Administration. She is currently completing a monograph about the global oil industry and financial rentier states in Russia and Brazil. A political economist based at HSE’s International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, she is completing a book manuscript about political legitimacy in financial-rentier states. Her fieldwork in Russia and Brazil has been supported by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius in Hamburg, Germany.