People

Meet the PIMS Team

Principal Investigators:

Dr Pawel Bukowski

Dr Pawel Bukowski

Lecturer in Economics

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: p.bukowski@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Pawel Bukowski is a Lecturer in Economics at University College London and Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also affiliated with London School of Economics. His research consists of two inter-related streams. The first considers labour market inequalities, in particular, the role of firms in wage determination, worker power and gender discrimination. The second focuses on understanding the evolution of national and sub-national economic inequalities, with particular focus on inequalities in Central and Eastern Europe.

He has published in leading international journals such Journal of Economic Growth or Journal of Labor Economics and played a reading role as both principal and co-investigator on competitive funding bids including Open Research Area, ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics, or LSE Research and Impact Fund. He has founded an expert group – Dobrobyt na Pokolenia (Prosperity for Generations), and a member of Concilium Civitas - a group of the influential Polish social scientists working abroad.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/pawel-bukowski

Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová

Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová

Lecturer in Political Sociology

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: jessie.hronesova@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 3108 4722 (54722)

I am a lecturer in political sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London with a focus on Southeast and Central Europe. I hold a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford.

I was formerly a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, funded by the European Union (2021-2023). From April to August 2023, I was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 2019 to 2021, I was ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development.

I have an extensive experience and knowledge of political sociology, comparative politics and the international development sector, both as an academic and practitioner, especially in eastern Europe. My approach is empathetic, foregrounding contextualized understandings of individual cases, particularly keen to understand individual and group motivations for political behaviour, rather than generalizations from large-N data. I work across several disciplines (political sociology, politics, history and socio-legal studies), using qualitative, archival and fieldwork methods. I am fluent in my native Czech, as well as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, German. I speak advanced French, command Spanish, and have some Italian and basic Ukrainian. I have lived and worked in the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States, Serbia, the United Kingdom, Austria and the Netherlands.

I previously worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo and Belgrade. I have also worked as an advisor for several UK-based consultancies and charities on issues such as gender-based violence, the rule of law and free media. I am a member of the UK’s Stabilization Unit. I have collaborated with and held fellowships at a range of research institutions, including the Czech Academy of Sciences, University of Graz, the London School of Economics (LSEE-E), Columbia University in New York, and Goldsmiths College in London where I taught a course on memory and justice in post-conflict societies. I was also a Chatham House Associate Fellow at the Europe Programme from 2020 to 2021.

In 2019-2021, I was a committee member of OxPeace (Oxford Peace), seminar convenor at the South East European Studies Oxford (SEESOX) and a Visiting Research Fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict (CRIC) at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

I hold a DPhil in Politics (2018) and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (2011), both from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), an MRes in Government from the London School of Economics, and an undergraduate degree in International Area Studies from the Charles University in Prague.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/dr-jessie-barton-hronesova

Co-Investigators:

Professor Anne White

Professor Anne White

Professor of Polish Studies and Social and Political Science

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: anne.white@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 7679 8816 (28816)

BA (1st class Hons), History and Russian, University of Oxford

1983 Lecturer in English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan

1983-84 PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science (Government and Sociology Departments)

1989 Lecturer in Russian, then Senior Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, University of Bath

1987-2014 Professor of Polish Studies and Social and Political Science

September 2014 - School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/anne-white

Dr Elodie Douarin

Dr Elodie Douarin

Associate Professor

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: e.douarin@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 7679 8822 (28822)

Applied Micro-economics, Transition Economics, Cultural and Institutional Economics, Happiness Studies, Political Participation, Consequences of Violence

Elodie Douarin joined UCL SSEES in June 2012. She previously worked for Imperial College (Wye College), SOAS, Kent University and the University of Sussex.

She was Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Emerging Economies at UCL SSEES (2013-2019) and she is one of the founding members of the Friday Association for Institutional Studies.

She co-edited the Palgrave Handbook of Comparative Economics (2021) with Prof. Oleh Havrylyshyn (Carleton University) - a comprehensive work on the field of "Comparative Economics", from its origins (Comparative Economic Systems), through the post communist transformation, to the breadth and depth of what it is today.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/elodie-douarin

https://www.elodiedouarin.co.uk/

Dr Jakub Beneš

Dr Jakub Beneš

Associate Professor

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: j.benes@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 7679 8731 (28731)

Originally from Oakland, California, Jakub Beneš earned a BA in International Studies from Middlebury College, Vermont and then a PhD in European History from the University of California, Davis. From 2012 to 2015 he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham. He taught at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham before coming to UCL SSEES in autumn 2019.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/dr-jakub-benes

Dr Michal Murawski

Dr Michal Murawski

Associate Professor

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: m.murawski@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 7679 8759 (28759)

Visiting Fellow
Yale University, Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, United States1 Oct 2022 - 1 Jan 2023

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Queen Mary, University of London, Department of Russian, United Kingdom1 Sep 2016 - 31 Aug 2018

Visiting Research Fellow
Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, United Kingdom1 Jul 2017 - 31 Aug 2018

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
University College London, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, United Kingdom1 Sep 2014 - 31 Aug 2016

Affiliated Lecturer in Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, United Kingdom1 Sep 2013 - 1 Oct 2014

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/michal-murawski

Dr Uilleam Blacker

Dr Uilleam Blacker

Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Faculty of Arts & Humanities, UCL

Email: u.blacker@ucl.ac.uk

Phone: 020 7679 8727 (28727)

I am a scholar and translator specialising in Ukrainian and east-central European literature and culture. In addition to my academic publications, I have written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the TLS, among others. I have commented on Ukrainian culture, history and politics for the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Al Jazeera, ITV and many more.

My translations of Ukrainian authors have been published in the Guardian, the White Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and more. I regularly review literature in translation for the press and have spoken on this topic at literary festivals in the UK and in Ukraine. In 2023, I was a judge for the International Booker Prize. In 2022, I was Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Before joining UCL SSEES as a lecturer in 2014, I held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; prior to that, I studied at UCL SSEES, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and at the University of Glasgow.

I have held research fellowships from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

I speak fluent Ukrainian, Polish and Russian.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/uilleam-blacker

Administrative Assistant:

Diana Sayradyan