Dorothee Elmiger
CES Visiting Scholar, Fall 2023
Dorothee Elmiger was born in 1985 in Switzerland. She is the author of Out of the Sugar Factory, Shift Sleepers and Invitation to the Bold of Heart. Elmiger has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Aspekte Literature Prize for the best debut novel written in German, the 2021 Schillerpreis, and most recently the 2022 Nicolas Born Prize. Out of the Sugar Factory was shortlisted for both the German and the Swiss Book Award. Elmiger is an editor at Volte Books. She lives in New York City. CES is welcoming her to the University of Michigan in Fall 2023 in partnership with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
Timothy Nunan
WCEE Visiting Scholar, Fall 2023
Timothy Nunan is Professor for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge in the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies at the University of Regensburg. Prior to holding this position, he was Acting Chair in the Department of Global History at the Free University of Berlin. There, he also led a Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Research Group devoted to the history of Islamism during the Cold War. His research focuses on international history, Russian and Soviet history, and the history of the modern Middle East. His first book, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan, examined the history of international development in Afghanistan during the Cold War, looking in particular at the role of the Soviet Union and Western humanitarian NGOs. His current book project explores Islamist internationalism from the 1950s to the 1980s. Prior to his positions in Germany, Dr. Nunan was a Harvard Academy Scholar and received his D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Maxie Schreiber
CES Visiting Scholar, Fall 2023
Maxie Schreiber is an architectural historian and author. After receiving her Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2016, she was Lecturer at the Department of Art and Architectural History at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Schreiber’s first book, Ancient Egyptian Architecture and its Reception in Modernity. Architecture in Germany 1900–1933, was published by Gebr. Mann in 2018. Her fields of research include the reception of Ancient Egyptian architecture; the historiography of German modern architecture; and public library architecture. Schreiber is currently finishing her second book about public libraries in Germany and the United States since the 1880s. She is particularly interested in how German public libraries emulate their American counterparts.
Yoo-Duk Kang
CES Visiting Scholar, 2022-23
Yoo-Duk Kang is professor of economics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Seoul, Korea, where he was previously dean of the language and trade division and editor of the HUFS Press. He teaches undergraduate courses in international economics and trade, and graduate courses in development economics and EU studies. His main research interests are trade policy, economic integration, and comparative studies of economic policies. He is also deeply interested in European studies from an economic perspective. Previously, Kang worked at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), where he published 40 policy reports about issues related to European economies, and as an external consultant for the Korean Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Industry and Trade, participating in implementation and assessment of Korea’s trade agreements.
Professor Kang has contributed more than 70 academic articles to journals including the Journal of European Integration, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Journal of Economic Integration, and Asian Development Review. He is co-author and contributor of 30 books about international economics and European studies. He is a board member of two renowned academic associations in Korea, the European Studies Association (EUSA), and the Korea and Korean Society of Contemporary European Studies. Professor Kang is a regular participant in EUSA Asia Pacific, and is co-editor of Asia Pacific Journal of EU Studies. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Institut d‘Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). His mentor at U-M is Professor Geneviève Zubrzycki (sociology).
Natasza Quelvennec
CCPS & CES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2023
Natasza Quelvennec is a Ph.D. candidate in social sciences and gender at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She is also the French National Centre for Scientific Research’s fellow affiliated to the European Center for Sociology and Political Science (CESSP). Her research interests lay at the intersection of gender studies, sociology of collective action, sociology of religion, sociology of culture, and political sociology. Her dissertation focuses on the politicization of abortion in Poland and the anchoring of political issues relating to reproductive rights in a broad context of (re)defining the social order after state socialism. Natasza analyses structuring and reconfigurations of the Polish political field throughout the post-communist period in the light of a double politicization crossing feminist and conservative mobilizations. An important socio-historical part of her research is devoted to the construction of Polish nationalism rooted in Catholicism and its impact on representations of motherhood and the role of women in society. She received her M.A. in humanities and social sciences from EHESS, specializing in gender studies and sociology. Natasza also holds a master degree in applied linguistics from the University of Warsaw.
Ania Aizman
WCEE Postdoctoral Scholar, 2021-22
Ania Aizman, assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures, is a Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia for 2021-22. Professor Aizman is currently writing the manuscript Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Pussy Riot, which shows that an intellectual and artistic anarchist culture has existed in Russia and among Russians abroad for over a hundred and fifty years. Offering an alternative genealogy of non-Marxist political thought and art, Anarchist Currents contributes a novel perspective to cultural studies
Soon after arriving at the University of Michigan, Professor Aizman co-founded with her students the Flying Subtitles Collective (flyingsubtitles.com), a cultural exchange project involving film, translation, and collaboration with emerging Russian filmmakers. The Collective, which is supported by WCEE and CREES, is a group of volunteer translators creating English-language subtitles for Russian films. Their work helps broaden the audience for emerging Russian filmmakers by providing free English subtitles for their documentaries and art films, and updating classic films in need of modernized English subtitles. This is a way to work on translation skills and improve one’s Russian while learning about new topics. A portfolio of the Collective’s work is available on flyingsubtitles.com.
Chanelle Reinhardt
WCEE Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-22
Chanelle Reinhardt is a Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et Culture postdoctoral scholar at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (2020-22). In 2018, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies. She received her PhD in art history from the Université de Montréal in 2021. She also obtained an MA in political science. She is preparing a book manuscript titled Moving “Everything that is Beautiful in Italy” to Paris: Material Conquests and Nation-building (1796-1798). Reinhardt’s research interests include nationalism, political spectacles and rites, propaganda, art and power, vision and visuality, the history of patriotism, and political emotions. By adopting a comparative perspective, her postdoctoral research focuses on the staging of populism and its visual and material expressions.
Alena Aniskiewicz
CCPS Visiting Scholar, 2020-21
Alena Aniskiewicz received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of Michigan in 2019 and was a University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities 2019-20 Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research, writing, and teaching explore Polish popular culture, literary history, and cultural heritage. Her current book project explores the relationship between Polish hip-hop and the nation's poetic tradition. She has written about Eastern European culture for Culture.pl, the Seattle Opera, Cosmopolitan Review, and Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review.
Cynthia Buckley
CREES Visiting Scholar, 2020-21
Professor Cynthia Buckley received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1991 before joining the faculty of the University of Texas, Austin. Between 2010-12 she served as the Program Director for Eurasia at the Social Science Research Council, later moving to the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A social demographer, her research focuses on the main drivers, and implications, of demographic change across Eurasia and appears in numerous academic journals, policy briefs, assessment reports, and edited volumes. Her current research focuses on a MINERVA-funded investigation of state capacity challenges in the areas of healthcare (including COVID-19), elections, and education in the multicultural countries of Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine (with Ralph Clem and Erik Herron), and a solo book project on population change and social stability in Central Asia.
Oksana Chabanyuk
CREES Visiting Scholar, 2019-20
Oksana Chabanyuk is an associate professor of architecture at Kharkiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Ukraine. For the 2019-20 academic year she is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan. Her research at CREES and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia will focus on the contribution of American specialists to the development of industry and cities in 1920-30s Eastern Ukraine. Dr. Chabanyuk’s academic interests include standardization and early industrialization in the USSR, influence of foreign specialists, prefabrication in industry and housing, post-socialist housing, social housing, and regeneration of residential areas. She is an architect and received her bachelor’s degree in architecture, MA in urban planning (2000), and PhD at the National University Lviv Polytechnic, Ukraine (2004). Her dissertation was entitled “Regeneration of the Residential Environment of High-rise Housing Areas of the 1970-80s (Lviv Case Study).” She has participated in various international competitions, programs, and workshops including: exchange study at Coventry University, UK (1996); Visiting Teachers Program at the AA School of Architecture, London (2010); visiting researcher at the University of Lisbon, Portugal (2014-15); visiting staff at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland (2015); and Lublin University of Technology, Poland (2016-18). Professor Chabanyuk has also participated at international conferences, roundtables and seminars in Germany, Portugal, Austria, Poland, UK, USA, and Ukraine.
Margitta Mätzke
CES Visiting Scholar, 2019-20
Margitta Mätzke is professor of politics and social policy at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. She earned her PhD in political science from Northwestern University (2005), and was a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, as well as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European Union Center of Excellence at U-M. Her research focuses on decision-making and institutional dynamics in the development of Western welfare states. Her articles are published in the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Public Policy, Social Policy & Administration, the German-language journal Leviathan, and the Journal of European Social Policy (where she co-edited a special issue on changes in European family policies). During her time at the Center for European Studies, Professor Mätzke will examine institutional development and governance in the Austrian and German health systems in comparative perspective. One project is an article about the institutionalization and governance of public health services in the context of the Austrian health system. She will also collaborate on a book project with Prof. Scott L. Greer from the School of Public Health, comparing institutional developments in the German, English, and United States’ health systems. The project documents increasing amounts of central government intervention, seeking to balance cost, quality, and access as complex systems of stakeholders and autonomous professions face fiscal strain. It asks how and why centralized solutions are deemed more suitable responses to the distributional conflicts that ensue under conditions of permanent austerity.
Karolina Szymaniak
CCPS Visiting Scholar, 2019-20
Karolina Szymaniak is an assistant professor of Jewish studies at the University of Wrocław and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, politics of memory, theories of modernism and of the avant-garde. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Museum of Modern Art in Łódz.
Prof. Szymaniak's book on the Polish-Yiddish modernist writer Debora Vogel was published in 2006 in Poland. She co-edited: Warszawska awangarda jidysz (Warsaw Yiddish Avant-garde); Dialog poetów (Dialogue of Poets); Montages: Debora Vogel and the New City Legend; and Moja dzika koza: Antologia poetek jidysz (My Wild Goat: Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets). She is the editor of Rachel Auerbach's ghetto writings, which received the 2016 Polityka History Award for the best edition of sources.
During her stay at U-M, Professor Szymaniak will be a fellow with the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies working on the project, “A Little Something in Yiddish? Entangled Histories of Yiddish Polish Cultural Contacts in the First Half of the 20th Century (up to 1948).”
Anastasiya Halauniova
CREES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2019
Anastasiya Halauniova is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lay at the intersection of cultural sociology, urban studies, and science and technology studies. Anastasiya's recent studies focus on the practices of valuation of aesthetics of architecture: how particular architectural spaces gain their aesthetic and non-aesthetic value especially in the context of a complex, multilayered history of repossession and transition from socialism. In other words, how is architecture evaluated and considered "beautiful" or "ugly," "authentic" or "fake"? These relations between urban materialities, aesthetic judgments, and their political meanings are the major focus of the comparative research Anastasiya is conducting in Wroclaw, Poland and Klaipeda, Lithuania. A graduate of European University at St. Petersburg, she received her MA in sociology, and studied waste collection and recycling systems from the perspective of responsibilization of users and non-users of the systems.
Roman Hutter
CREES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2019
Roman Hutter is a PhD candidate in contemporary history at the University of Vienna and a Botstiber-Fellow/Visiting Graduate Student at the German Department of the University of Michigan. His research focuses on Central and Eastern European history of the twentieth century, with particular attention to politics of history and cultural policy. His dissertation focuses on Romanian-German poet Oskar Pastior and seeks to frame the correlation of identity and cultural politics in (East)-Central Europe during the Cold War. Utilizing Pastior’s biography and escape story his thesis aims to critically evaluate the concept of intermediation. Hutter received his bachelor’s degree in history and his master’s degree in Eastern European history at the University of Vienna.
Agata Zysiak
WCEE Visiting Scholar, Winter 2019
Agata Zysiak, assistant professor at Warsaw University, is a sociologist of culture. Her research interests include historical sociology, biography, and modernity in Eastern Europe. She is the author of the award-winning book about the socialist university and upward mobility in postwar Poland, Punkty za pochodzenie (Points for Social Origin) (2016), and co-author of the recent volume From Cotton and Smoke: The Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity 1897–1994 (2018). She has been a visiting scholar at Wayne State University (Detroit), Free University (Berlin), Central European University (Budapest), and the University of Vienna (Austria). She held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, in 2017-18. At the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, she continues her comparative research on the working class in Detroit and Lodz.
Irina Khutsieva
CREES Visiting Scholar, Fall 2018
Irina Khutsieva, stage director and acting instructor in Moscow, will be an Artist in Residence at the Residential College as well as a CREES Visiting Scholar for Fall 2018. Dr. Khutsieva will direct two short plays—one in Russian, one in English—which will be performed in the Residential College’s Keene Theatre in early December. Trained at “GITIS,” the Russian Academy of Theatrical Art, Dr. Khutsieva has more than 30 years of experience in Russian theater. She now directs her own studio theater, the Chamber Theater, Moscow, founded in 2004. Dr. Khutsieva has staged more than 50 plays in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. She has worked at one of Russia’s most distinguished theater academies—the Shchepkin Higher Theatre Institute, associated with the State Academic Maly Theatre of Russia. She also has extensive experience teaching college drama majors. A specialist and practitioner of the Stanislavski Method, she incorporates the principles and traditions of Russian psychological theater and has also developed her own staging and teaching methods. In recent years, she has directed a major gala performance shown on Russian national TV and has run workshops for professional actors in regional towns throughout Russia.
Muriel Darmon
CES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2018
Muriel Darmon is a sociologist and a Senior Research Fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the CESSP-CSE (EHESS, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). She studies socialization processes in various contexts (weight-loss groups, hospitals and schools). She is the author of Becoming anorexic: a sociological study (Routledge), La Socialisation (Armand Colin) and Classes préparatoires: la fabrique d’une jeunesse dominante (La Découverte).
Jean-François Laniel
CES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2018
Jean-François Laniel was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Sociology, and a research fellow at the Center for European Studies in Winter 2018 He received his PhD in sociology from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2018. Following his time at U-M, Laniel was appointed to a tenure-track position at Laval University in Quebec City.
Laniel’s research focuses on the dynamics between tradition and modernity; religion, culture, and politics; and Christianity and nationalism in small nations. His postdoctoral research compares Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Finland—three small nations of different Christian traditions—focusing on the ways in which these societies define pluralism and secularism, and the role of nationalism in that process.
He is widely published in French-language outlets. His work in English has been published in Nations and Nationalism, Social Compass, and Religious Studies.
Chanelle Reinhardt
CES Visiting Scholar, Winter 2018
Chanelle Reinhardt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Cinema Studies at the Université de Montréal and a research fellow at the Center for European Studies in 2018-19. She studies the staging of power in the era of mass politics. Her dissertation explores the intersection between war, science, art, and technology through an analysis of propaganda mechanisms of the 1798 French revolutionary festival “l’Entrée triomphale des objets de sciences et d’arts.” Her research interests include material culture, vision and visuality, and multiple forms of representations.
