Iaroslav Boretskii, MA
Iaroslav Boretskii is an infographic designer working at ZOiS – Centre for Eastern European and International Studies. He studied Cartography, Geoinformatics and Graphic Design over four consecutive semesters at Technical University Munich (TUM), Technische Universität Wien (TUW), Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), and the University of Twente (ITC Department). Iaroslav’s work and research interests include visual communication, data journalism, infographics, multimedia cartography and interactive data-driven visualisations, particularly in relation to social and economic geography, demographics, sustainable development and geopolitics.
Dr. Katarina Damčević
Katarina Damčević is a post-doc researcher at IOS – Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European, where she also coordinates the KonKoop Junior Researchers’ Group and contributes to the creation of a database of knowledge-production centres for Peace and Conflict Studies in Eastern Europe. Before that, she defended her doctoral dissertation titled “Semiotics of Hate Speech and Contested Symbols: The ‘Za dom spremni’ Ustaša Salute in Contemporary Croatia” in 2023 at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Katarina was a research fellow in the US based Dangerous Speech Project, the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Serbia, and the seeFField Fellowship program at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is also one of the co-founders of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research in Southeast Europe based in Croatia at the University of Rijeka’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition to that, she teaches at the University of Tartu and contributes to the Journal Southeastern Europe (Brill) as an editorial team member.
PD Dr. Tsypylma Darieva
Tsypylma Darieva is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), where she heads the Migration and Diversity research cluster. She studied Social Anthropology at Freie University Berlin and received her doctorate as well as her habilitation from Humboldt-University zu Berlin. Before coming to ZOiS, she was Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and research associate at FSU Jena, at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle). She is a co-founder of the ZOiS Caucasus Network and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Jena-Cauc project Resilience in the South Caucasus (FSU Jena), and she teaches in the Department of Transregional Central Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Dr. Ivaylo Dinev
Ivaylo Dinev is a political scientist and, since April 2022, a postdoctoral researcher at ZOiS, where he coordinates the Multi-Method Data Laboratory of the KonKoop research network. He holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the joint doctoral initiative of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, University of Siena, University of Pisa and University of Florence. Prior to that, he completed BA and MA at Sofia University in Southeast European Studies and Cultural Anthropology. In the last five years, he did fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Study (Sofia) and Centre for Southeast European Studies (University of Graz), and taught a course on civil society and social movements at the University of Florence. Before joining ZOiS, Ivaylo Dinev worked as a researcher at the Institute for Social and Trade Union Research in the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Bulgaria and as a postdoctoral researcher at Sofia University. During his doctoral studies, he examined development and variations of protest cycles in Bulgaria and Slovenia by employing a comparative-historical approach based on the triangulation of original protest event dataset with qualitative data.
Dr. Nadja Douglas
Nadja Douglas is a political scientist and a researcher at ZOiS. She studied Political Science, Philosiophy and History at the University of Bonn and the University of Washington in Seattle. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from Sciences Po Paris and a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin In the context of her doctoral thesis (published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2017), she spent a considerable amount of time in various parts of Russia. Prior to taking up her current position, she worked as a Liaison Officer for the German OSCE Chairmanship 2016 at the OSCE Mission to Moldova and as an advisor on security and defence policy at the German Bundestag. She also held positions at the International Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE and the Development and Peace Foundation in Bonn. From 2015 to 2016, she was a member of the editorial team of Russland Analysen.
Silke Dutzmann
Silke Dutzmann is an experienced map editor at the Leibniz Institute of Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig. Since finalising her studies in Dresden, she has been a member of the Cartography working group (department for Cartography and Visual Communication) for over 20 years. Her work priorities include atlas cartography, map updates, data research and cartographic support for scientific publications.
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Nikola Gajić, MA
Since 2022, Nicola Gajić is a PhD-student at IOS. He did his BA in International Relations at the University of Belgrade and holds a MA in Southeast European Studies from the University of Graz and an MA in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University. In September 2020, he joined the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade as a researcher at the RECOM project.
Dr. Guénola Inizan
Guénola Inizan is a postdoctoral researcher. After defending her PhD in Geography and Planning on the “Renovation" programme in Moscow at Lumière Lyon 2 University (2024), she worked on housing and urban policies in occupied Ukraine at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Germany), the Department of Geography at the University of Łódź (Poland), and the Lviv Center for Urban History (Ukraine). She is a member of the project “Occupied and Erased: Stories of Ukraine’s Lost Homes”.
Anja Kurth
Anja Kurth ist in der Abteilung Kartographie und Visuelle Kommunikation am Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde als Kartographin tätig. Von 2003 bis 2005 absolvierte sie eine duale Ausbildung im Bereich Kartografie mit praktischer Ausbildung am IfL und begleitendem theoretischem Unterricht in Gotha. Seit 2006 ist sie für die Erstellung von Kartenprodukten im Online- und Printbereich zu ständig.
Dr. Gaëlle Le Pavic
Gaëlle Le Pavic is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Ghent University and an Associate Research Fellow at UNU-CRIS; she conducts research in three directions 1) the intersection of social services and geopolitics 2) the social consequences of borders and border contestations 3) knowledge production and ethics in research. During her PhD research, she focused on access to social welfare and social services within and across contested borders with Abkhazia and Transnistria as case studies. Her research investigates specifically the role of civil society organizations in facilitating this access within and across de facto borders.
Dr. Ekaterina Mikhailova
Ekaterina Mikhailova is a Political Geographer based at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, working at the crossroads of Border Studies, Eastern European Studies and Governance. She has over ten years of research experience, studying Eurasian borderlands. She is a regional editor of the Journal of Borderlands Studies and Head of the project "Border(land) Museums as sites of remembering and forgetting: between lieux de mémoire et lieux de l’oubli" (2026-2028) funded by the French-Nordic trilateral program CUNP/FMSH. Before joining the UiT, Dr. Mikhailova held postdoctoral positions in many well-known centres of Border Research and Eastern European Studies, including the University of Eastern Finland (Finland), the University of Geneva (Switzerland), the Leibniz Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern European Studies (Germany) and Luxembourg Institute of Social-Economic Research (Luxembourg).
Nafisa Mirzojamshedzoda, MA
Nafisa Mirzojamshedzoda is a PhD-student at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Faculty of Forest and Environment, and the University of Fribourg. She completed her undergraduate studies in Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and received her Master’s degree in International Development Studies from the University of Marburg and Sogang University in Seoul.
Dr. Jana Moser
Jana Moser is head of the department of Cartography and Visual Communication and coordinator of the research area Geovisualisations at IfL. She studied Cartography and received her doctorate from Technical University of Dresden, with an investigation of the cartographical history of Namibia until 1990. Before she joined IfL, Jana Moser was head of the post “Historical Atlas of Saxony” in Dresden at the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig.
Lena Pieber, MA
Lena Pieber joined KonKoop & ZOiS in April 2022 as a PhD-researcher. She studied international relations at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna as well as international development and gender studies at the University of Vienna. Before joining ZOiS, she supported the EU Delegation to the International Organisations in Vienna and was working with the UN Women National Committee Austria and the Austrian Foreign Ministry. Her last position was Press Attaché of the Austrian Embassy in Moscow.
Prof. Dr. Gwendolyn Sasse
Gwendolyn Sasse is Academic Director of ZOiS and Einstein Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism at the Department of Social Sciences of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her academic career began with the study of history, Slavonic studies and political science at the University of Hamburg and led her to an MSc and PhD in political science at the London School of Economics. After that, she took up a post as Assistant Professor at the Central European University, and then as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 2013, she became Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations and at the Oxford School for Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford . She maintains her connection with Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College and is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the think tank Carnegie Europe.
Dr. Sabine von Löwis
Sabine von Löwis is senior researcher at ZOiS since 2017 and head of the research cluster Conflict Dynamics and Border Regions. She studied Economic and Social Geography at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) and gained a doctorate in political science at HafenCity University in Hamburg. She has held positions at various university and non-university research institutes, working on projects on the stability and change of spatial structures in urban and rural areas. From 2011 to 2017, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch, where she was involved in the joint research project Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa (Phantom borders in East Central Europe) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Having studied the persistence and dissolution of spatial structures in Western Ukraine within this project framework, she now focuses her research on the post-Soviet space.
Dr. Mela Žuljević
Mela Zuljevic is a design researcher with a PhD in architecture (UHasselt, Belgium). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, working at the intersection of design, cartography and landscape research. Her research project looks at cartographic legacies of international diplomacy and peace-making in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on how they materialise in the landscape. Besides her research project, she coordinates the Multi-Perspective Visualisation Laboratory for Peace and Conflict Cartography (VisLab) of the KonKoop network. Previously, she studied Design and Visual Communications at the University of Sarajevo. She worked as an assistant professor at the Interior Design Department of the ‘Dzemal Bijedic’ University of Mostar. As a co-founder and coordinator of the Abart art collective, she explored artistic and curatorial practices in public space, focusing on the post-war division and reconstruction of Mostar.