Iuliia Mendel
WCEE Distinguished Fellow, 2023-24
Iuliia Mendel is a Ukrainian journalist, political commentator and opinion writer for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Politico Europe, VICE, The Evening Standard, World Affairs Journal, Kyivpost, Spiegel Online and CNBC. After several years as a television journalist, and a fellowship with the World Press Institute in Minnesota, Mendel served as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s press secretary from June 2019 to July 2021. Her 2022 book, The Fight of Our Lives, covers Ukrainian politics, the Russian war against Ukraine and her work with President Zelenskyy. Mendel comes to the University of Michigan as the WCEE Distinguished Fellow and a Knight-Wallace Fellow, and will actively participate with both units during her time in Ann Arbor.
Twitter: @IuliiaMendel Instagram: @iuliia_mendel
The War for Hearts and Minds: Populism’s Battle with the Media
As a journalist and later as press secretary to President Zelenskyy, Mendel met many political leaders– including Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump– with populist platforms that simplified complex issues and appealed to citizens’ strongest emotions. She found that populism today is often based on disinformation that is easily amplified by social media and new technologies and easily exploited by populist leaders in both democratic and autocratic contexts. Mendel’s research will seek solutions to protect and empower truth-seeking journalists around the world in a climate of growing populism.
Julián Casanova
WCEE Distinguished Fellow, 2022-23
Julián Casanova is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza and Visiting Professor at the Central European University of Vienna. He is the author of, among other works, La historia social y los historiadores (Crítica, 1991; new edition 2014); De la calle al frente. El anarcosindicalismo en España, 1931-1939 (Crítica, 1997, published in English by Routledge, London, 2004, under the title Anarchism, The Republic and Civil War in Spain 1931-1939); La Iglesia de Franco (Crítica, 2005); República y guerra civil, Crítica/Marcial Pons, 2007 (English edition with notes in Cambridge University Press, 2010); Europa contra Europa, 1914-1945 (Crítica, 2011); and España partida en dos. Breve historia de la guerra civil española (Crítica, 2013; original in English in I.B. Tauris, London, 2012, new/revised edition in Bloomsbury 2021, A Short History of the Spanish Civil War; Turkish edition in Iletisim, Istanbul, 2015; Arabic edition, Doha, 2017). Edited works include Cuarenta años con Franco (Crítica, 2015). Casanova is also co-author with Carlos Gil Andrés of Historia de España en el siglo XX (Ariel, 2009; English edition with notes in Cambridge University Press, 2014). His latest books are La venganza de los siervos. Rusia 1917 (Crítica, 2017) and Una violencia indómita. The European Twentieth Century (Crítica, 2020).
Professor Casanova has been a visiting professor at prestigious European (Queen Mary College of London and Central European University in Budapest); American (Harvard, Notre Dame, and New School for Social Research); and Latin American (FLACSO and Universidad Industrial de Santander) universities. During the 2018-19 academic year he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals. In 2006, Casanova selected and presented for TVE eight programs of documentaries filmed and made during the Spanish Civil War under the title La guerra filmada (edited by Filmoteca Española, Ministry of Culture, 2009). He has been a historical advisor for Alejandro Amenábar’s film Mientras dure la guerra.
Yevgenia Albats
WCEE Distinguished Fellow, 2019-20
Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author and radio host. Since 2007, she has been the Political Editor and then Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The New Times, a Moscow-based, Russian language independent political weekly. It went digital in June of 2017 when its distribution and sales were severed by the Russian authorities.
Since 2004 Albats has hosted Absolute Albats, a talk-show on Ekho Moskvy, the only remaining liberal radio station in Russia. Albats was an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow assigned to the Chicago Tribune in 1990, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1980, and received her PhD in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004.
She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since its founding in 1996. Albats taught at Yale in 2003-2004, and she was a full-time professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, where she taught institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy until 2011 when her courses were cancelled at the request of top Kremlin officials.
In 2017, Albats was chosen as inaugural fellow at Kelly’s Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. Albats is the author of the four independently researched books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose graduates are running the country today. She has a daughter, and resides in Moscow, Russia.
She is the International Institute Distinguished Faculty Fellow and WCEE Distinguished Fellow for 2019-20. While in residence at the University of Michigan, Albats will continue her radio show while also teaching courses in political science. On January 27, 2020, she will deliver a lecture titled "The Russian Media: 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall" as part of the CREES 60th Anniversary series.
Krzysztof Śmiszek
WCEE Distinguished Fellow, Fall 2018
Krzysztof Śmiszek is a Polish human rights lawyer and activist. He received his Ph.D. in law from the University of Warsaw and is a lecturer at the Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University in Poland.
Dr. Śmiszek’s main area of expertise are human rights of minorities and women, with a special focus on LGBTI rights. He is also interested in comparative international anti-discrimination legislations and institutional protection against discrimination.
He is currently the managing editor of The Anti-Discrimination Law Review.
