Graduated from CEU in 2007 from the Gender M.A. program.

She has since worked as an European Union project manager trainee, and assisted in EU Financial trainings.  She has recently assisted, and presented at the Alternative Cultures and Urban Spaces Conference in Budapest (April 2009), and hosted two city tours: the farkasret cemetery and Moszkva Square.

These and other research topics can be viewed on her sites: polyandrium.yolasite.com and bernadettball.synthasite.com

She is currently working as a Festival Assistant for the Verzio 6: International Human Rights Documentary Filmfestival.

Irina Papkova completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from Georgetown University in 2006. She has taught at Georgetown, George Washington University, and the Russian State Pedagogical University of A. I. Gerzen. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the International Relations and European Studies Department, Central European University. Her research interests include religion and politics, nationalism and ethnic conflict, and the political implications of historical memory. Her regional focus is Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Papkova’s publications include, among others, “The Russian Orthodox Church and Political Party Platforms” in Journal of Church & State and “Notes on Recent Scholarship on Orthodoxy and Politics in Russia” in the current issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian History and Culture. She is currently completing the manuscript of Russian Orthodoxy and Post-Soviet Federal Politics, a book exploring the relationship of religion and politics in Post-Soviet Russia. Prior to coming to CEU, Papkova held the position of Title VIII Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From March to August 2008 she held the Junior Robert Bosch Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where she worked on a study of grass-roots fundamentalism in the Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe. She has presented the results of her research at the Midwest Political Science Association, the Southern Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the Association for the Study of Nationalities, as well as at other academic and policy venues, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and National Public Radio.

Kate Coyer is post-doctoral research fellow with the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU). She teaches course in global media, civil society and resistance at both universities. Kate received her PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2006, Her PhD research was a comparative study of community radio in Britain and the US, and she is currently examining community broadcasting policies across Europe.

She is an occasional contributor to the alternative news site Indymedia.org and London’s Resonance FM, and has conducted radio production workshops and trainings in many parts of the world. She has been producing radio and organising media campaigns for the past twenty years and has helped build community radio stations in the US and Tanzania with the Prometheus Radio Project. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Radio Studies Network. Her recent publications include the Handbook of Alternative Media (co-edited, Routledge, 2007), chapters in Battleground: the Media (Greenwood Press, 2007), Global Media, Global Activism (Pluto, 2005), and News Inc: Corporate Media Ownership and its Threat to Democracy (co-authored with Pete Tridish), and a policy brief on community radio in the journal Global Media and Communications. You can read her journal account of the station-building project in Tanzania at: www.prometheusradio.org/tanzania.shtml.

Studied and now specialises in the design of information resources for the humanities. She is currently involved in the development of several online resources at the OSA in Budapest. One such project, which is headed by Dr. Ann Komaromi from the University of Toronto and funded by the Canadian SSHRC, is to build an online union catalogue and digital repository of samizdat periodicals, publications produced and circulated in underground networks in the former Eastern Bloc. The database is being developed under the aegis of the International Samizdat [Research] Association.

Dr. Libora Oates-Indruchová is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Masaryk University, Brno. She has a habilitation in literature from the Szeged University, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Lancaster, as well as an MA in Contemporary Literary Studies from the same university, and an undergraduate Master’s degree in English Language and Literature, and Sports Science from Charles University in Prague.

Her research interests include censorship, cultural representations of gender and narrative research. She also completed a project on the body in physical culture and sports. Her research has been funded, among others, by the Czech Science Foundation, Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Open Society Foundation, and the British Council. She currently holds a Marie Curie Fellowship awarded by the European Commission for a research project on post-1989 narratives of state-socialist academic publishing and censorship. The project focuses on the strategies of professional survival, the relationship of researchers to the ideologised language of the time, and the politics of memory in personal narratives.

Dr. Oates-Indruchová published a book on the Discourses of Gender in Pre-and Post-1989 Czech Culture and is the editor of two anthologies of feminist thought and feminist literary theory in Czech translation.

Maria Whiteman (B.A., North Carolina, M.F.A., Penn State) is an artist, photographer and writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has taught Multimedia and Studio Art at McMaster University, where she currently teaches Visual and Cultural Studies. She has exhibited recently at Transit Gallery (Hamilton), McMaster University Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (Helsinki). In addition to writing several catalogue essays, she has published in Resources for Feminist Research and contributed the entry on “Visual Culture” to the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005). Current projects include Critical Peripateticism, a multimedia project she began in 2007 during a two-month residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

MarkYoffe, Ph. D. Curator of International Counterculture Archive, Global Resources Center, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, DC
Ethnology, folklore, rock music, urban tribes, counterculture, subcultures
Humor and satire
Blogs about rock music for Voice of America, Russian Service
 

Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Head of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Institute for Humanities (St. Petersburg State University, Russia). An expert in the field of the theory of knowledge, philosophical and religious anthropology, philosophy of culture, and history of music. Dr. Uvarov’s primary area of research is the relationship between Russian and European cultural paradigms. In recent years (2001-2007) he has published several works devoted to problems of ontology of culture, multicultural education, and to the role of Christianity in contemporary culture. Dr. Uvarov is a participant and organizer of many international philosophical conferences and congresses (Russia, Ukraine, Finland, Denmark, Germany, USA, Poland, Hungary, Italy). He has published more than 250 research articles in Russian, English, Finnish, and Portuguese (1983-2007) as well as 7 monographs. He is an active member of international societies and associations on aesthetics, semiotics, and Christian education.

Petra Rethmann focuses her research in two main areas: Russia and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of inter-related issues and questions concerning: the relationship between aesthetics and desire; histories of the revolution and their place in contemporary political cultures (with a special view to Russia and South Africa); the relationship between radicalism and mediation; contemporary cultures of memory and nostalgia; and theoretizations of gender.

She is the author of Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East (Penn State Press, 2001) and co-editor of Globality, Autonomy and Culture(UBS Press, in preparation, in addition to numerous articles which have appeared in journals such as American Ethnologist, Cultural Critique, Interventions and Public Culture.

Hei! My name is Rael, Im the coordinator of the project this summer. Here below you can find some information about my life and work. Just in case, my email is rael@publicpreparation.org. See you soon in Pärnu!

Rael Artel (b 1980) is an independent curator based in the forests of Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003, and participated in the Curatorial Training Programme in De Appel, Amsterdam (2004/05). Since 2000, she has contributed to a number of magazines in Estonia and elsewhere, and curated shows in Estonia as well as in Lisbon, New York, Amsterdam and Warsaw. In 2004–2008 she ran and moderated her project space Rael Artel Gallery: Non-Profit Project Space. Her current project – Public Preparation, an international platform for networking and knowlegde-production – deals critically with the growing tendencies of nationalism in contemporary Europe, aiming to envision alternative ways to think about global community (www.publicpreparation.org).

Vlad Strukov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies and the Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds. He was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Moscow, Pittsburgh and London. He is a new media curator and the founding editor of Static, an international journal supported by the Tate and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is a member of the Russian Cinema Research Group, University College London. He is the editor of The Russian Cyberspace Journal (www.russian-cyberspace.com), dedicated to the study of Russian, Eurasian and Central European new media. He is completing a volume on discourses of glamour and celebrity, co-authored with Helena Goscilo, as well the Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Russia, co-authored with Robert Saunders. Dr Strukov's research on film, animation, mass media and national identity has appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and other publications.