Presenters

Marianna Muravyeva is a Professor of Russian Law and Administration at the University of Helsinki. Her research is interdisciplinary bringing together history, social sciences and law to examine long-term trends and patterns in social development with a special focus on normativity, gender and violence. Some of her most recent projects focus on human rights of women, conservative jurisprudence, violence against women, and family violence (violence against parents and domestic violence). Professor Muravyeva co-chairs Women and Gender Network of the European Social Sciences History Conference and a founding member of the Russian Association of Women’s Historians (RAIZhI). She has published extensively, including a recent book Parricide and Violence against Parents: A Cross-Cultural View across the Past and Present (London, New York: Routledge, 2021); edited volumes Domestic Disturbances, Patriarchal Values: Violence, Family and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2015); Women’s History in Russia: (Re)Establishing the Field (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014); Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) and numerous articles and books chapters.

Julia Mannherz is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultural history of the Russian empire and she is is especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches.  Julia is currently working on a book about provincial women and their engagement with music, literature, and folklore. Recent publications related to that project include “Piano Music, Fantasy, and Elizaveta Ivanova’s Ambivalent Feminism.” Women’s History Review 31, no. 3 (2022): 408–28, and “Performing Glinka’s Opera A Life for the Tsar on the Village Stage.” Slavic Review 79, no. 4 (2020): 755–77. Previous work includes Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press 2012), in which she analysed the widespread fascination with the supernatural in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, and its role in contemporary discussions about science, folklore, literature, and theology.

Yulia Yurchuk is Assistant Professor of History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She specializes in transnational intellectual history, memory studies, history of religion, and the study of nationalism in East European countries. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014) and co-editor of “Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective” (Routledge, 2022). Currently she is working on the project in the field of the transnational intellectual history titled “From Sweden with Love: Circulation and interpretation of Ellen Key’s ideas about love, motherhood, and upbringing in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union (1890-1930s)” funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Janet Laidla is Lecturer of Estonian history at the Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu. She defended her PhD on early modern chronicle writing in 2017, but has recently concentrated on women’s and gender history in Estonia. Laidla mainly focuses on the educated and professional women of the 19th and the 20th century. Her research interests are twofold 1) women, professionalisation and the university in the 19th and first part of the 20th century and 2) the role of women in the national awakening and women’s movement. Since 2022 Laidla has presented on these topics both at national and international level, her first research paper on the women members of the Estonian Society of Literati was published in late 2023. Together with her PhD student Lembi Anepaio, Laidla wrote on the first women from Estonia who defended their PhDs, published in 2024. 

Irina Paert is Associate Professor in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Tartu (PhD the University of Essex (1998), Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester (2000) and lecturer in the University of Wales (2001-2006). Her research focuses on the historical and theological analysis of the forms of social and symbolic solidarity within the Orthodox Church in the Baltic and especially in Estonia between late tsarist era to the end of the 1930s, including the clerical congresses, lay-based renewal movements such as Russian Student Christian Movement. She also has interest in memorial solidarities around memory of martyrs and new-martyrs, which brings her research into the present day Estonian Orthodoxy. She is the author of Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850 (Manchester, 2003) and Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russia (DeKalb, 2010), and editor of Orthodoxy in the Baltic: Politics, Religion and Education, 17840-1930 (in Russian, Tartu, 2018). She has edited several journal special issues: the New Literary Review (Semiotics of Juri Lotman and film analysis, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 5: 147, 2017), co-edited with Riho Altnurme Usuteaduslik Ajakiri (“Religion and resistance”, UA,  64:1, 2013), with Dr White Canadian Slavonic Papers (“Reimagining the Diocese: Administrative, Sacred, and Imperial Space in the Russian Empire”. CSP, Vol. 62, no. 3-4, 2020). Paert is a co-chair of IOTA (International Orthodox Theological Association) group Orthodox Asceticism and Spirituality, a member of a research network of Institute for Academic Study of Eastern Christianity (Prof Tolstoj, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Since 2014 Paert organised annual conferences with School of St John and the Arvo Pärt Centre.

Monika Rogers (former Kareniauskaite) specializes in Soviet and post-Soviet history, law, gender and criminality. She is currently a Researcher at the Lithuanian institute of History, Department of Twentieth-Century History. Monika’s research and interests cover criminal prosecution systems in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania and the USSR, anti-Soviet resistance, Gender-Based violence and Gender Equality, the dissident movement and the culture of remembrance in the former Eastern Bloc, Digital Humanities. In 2017 she received a Ph.D. in History (Vilnius University). She has been a Research Fellow at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland, 2013-2014), a project coordinator and research assistant at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (2015), a leader of a research project on gender-based violence in twentieth-century Lithuania, a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University (2019), a visiting scholar at Bremen University (2021) and a Research Fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard University.