Organisers

Catherine Gibson is a lecturer in East European and Eurasian Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu. Her research to date has focused on the history of nationalism, language, and science in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the Baltic provinces of the Romanov Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of the book Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford University Press, 2022) and PI of the ERC funded-project EMPSOLID “Empire of solidarities: a connected history of private charity across a decentred Romanov Empire, 1855–1914.” (Photo by Patricia Goh)

Ketevan Gurchiani is a professor of anthropology and head of the research center for cultural anthropology at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. She is particularly interested in lived religion, urban anthropology, and informal practices of resistance.

Una Bergmane is a Research Council of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. In 2023, Oxford University Press published her book Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Before joining Helsinki University, Una Bergmane was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD from the Sciences Po Paris. 

Matthew Blackburn is a Senior Researcher in NUPI’s Research Group on Russia, Asia and International Trade. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. His research mainly focuses on the politics of contemporary Russia and Eurasia, including both domestic political systems and interstate relations. He is engaged in research on Iran-Russia-China cooperation for the Norwegian Geopolitics Centre and is a research coordinator for the Civilizationalism Project based at Stanford University.

Dmytro Khutkyy is the Head of the University of Tartu Ukraine. In Ukraine, he participated in grassroots civic activism, consulted international development projects, and advised on reforms of the Ukraine’s government related to access to information, public accountability, and civic participation. In Estonia, he conducts academic research, training and teaching, policy analysis and advice, and strategic communication to support Ukraine’s reconstruction, development, and European integration.