Russia’s War Against Ukraine and Ukraine’s Challenge to the EU

SPEAKERS

MARIA POPOVA

Maria Popova (PhD, Harvard 2006) is the Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She is also the Scientific Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. Her research focuses on the rule of law, judicial reform, political corruption, populist parties, and legal repression of dissent across the post-Communist region. She teaches courses on European politics, comparative judicial politics, and research methods. She is currently writing a book on the politics of corruption prosecutions in Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine.

ADAM FAGAN

Adam Fagan has been at the forefront of education transformation at King’s as Vice-Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Social Sciences & Public Policy. He has taken a central role on Portfolio Simplification within the Faculty and led both the King’s First Year initiative, which brings together professional services and academic staff who are working to create a distinctive experience for King’s first-year students, and the development of the new Graduate Teaching Assistant framework. Adam is particularly passionate about capturing the student voice and ensuring the best possible support and experience for all our undergraduate and postgraduate students. Adam joined the Department of Political Economy in 2019 as Professor of European Politics, as well as Vice-Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy. From August 2021 he took on the role of Interim Vice President (Education). Prior to joining King’s, Adam held a Chair at Queen Mary University of London, where he was also Head of the School of Politics and International Relations.

OXANA SHEVEL

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts, current President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Professor Shevel’s current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. The book won the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. Professor Shevel’s research appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Slavic Review and in edited volumes. She also currently serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and a co-chair of the Post-Communist Politics and Economics Workshop at the Davis Center at Harvard.

MILADA VACHUDOVA

Professor Milada Anna Vachudova specializes in European politics, political change in postcommunist Europe, the European Union and the impact of international actors on domestic politics. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states amidst strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and the European Union. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. She served as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at UNC from 2014 to 2019. Her book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism (Oxford University Press) was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University. As a British Marshall Scholar, she completed an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in the Faculty of Politics at the University of Oxford. She has held fellowships from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the European University Institute (EUI), the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the National Science Foundation, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University and many other institutions.

GRAEME ROBERTSON