UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Organising Committee

(place your mouse over a name to view their resume)

Conference co-ordinators

Jana Nahodilová
- Jana is full time Language Tutor at University of Bristol, where she teaches Czech language, Contemporary Czech Society and Politics, Introduction to Czech Cinema since 1963 and Gender Identity in the Czech Republic. She is also developing an interactive resource centre for students and organises Czech club with activities relating to the Czech Republic.
  She has completed her Masters degree at Birkbeck College, London with thesis on Emancipation of Czech Women during and after communism, comparing political rhetoric and everyday reality. She is currently working towards her PhD at SSEES, UCL. Her topic is Gender and National Identity in the Czech Republic and Slovakia since 1989. Her PhD will investigate how women’s perception of womanhood in the Czech Republic and Slovakia has changed in the period from the fall of communism to EU entry, and what role ‘nation-ness’ has played in this.
Karolina Shapland
- Karolina is a Polish born sociologist with a strong interest in classical theory, sociology of organisations and globalization. In her MA thesis, completed at the Warsaw University, she investigated the intriguing world of a global consulting company PriceWaterhouseCooper. This work resulted in a book, titled “Going Global. Globalisation Process in a Consultancy” (Warsaw 2001). Currently, Karolina is studying at SSEES where she is preparing an MPhil/PhD dissertation titled “The New Professionals?” under Prof. George Kolankiewicz. This empirical study aims is to prove the existence of new strata of professionals in Poland and Ukraine, whose defining features are shaped by the process of globalisation. Throughout her professional career Karolina has tried to link her theoretical sociological and methodological interests with their empirical applications, such as market research within FMGS and business to business sectors. Apart from her work as a researcher and a conference co-ordinator, Karolina enjoys teaching, progressing from teaching Polish and English as a secondary language to Primary School children to teaching and lecturing undergraduates within a Principles of Sociology course run by Prof. George Kolankiewicz at SSEES.

Committee officers

Catherine Baker - Participant Co-ordination & Audio Visual Liaison
- Catherine Baker is a PhD student at SSEES where she is researching popular music in Croatia since 1991, under the supervision of Wendy Bracewell. She completed her MA in Central and South-East European Studies at SSEES in 2003 and her BA in History at the London School of Economics in 2000. Her research interests include the construction of national and transnational identity; national narratives and their representations of the past; and popular music and the entertainment media. She has presented conference papers in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Dubrovnik, and is currently a Research Assistant on the 'East Looks West' travel writing project at SSEES's Centre for South-East European Studies
Barbara Madaj - Publicity and Accommodation officer
- Barbara completed her MA degree in Economics and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 2002. Then, for two-and-a-half years she worked in an international research consultancy, where she organised, implemented and analysed projects in developing countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. Since January 2005 she is a MPhil/PhD student at SSEES under the supervision of Professor Kolankiewicz.
  Academically, Barbara is interested in exploring people’s motivations and behaviour through a multi-disciplinary prism. In particular, she focuses on international labour migration. Her previous research looked at expectations, motivations and intensions to seek employment in Western Europe post-EU-enlargement among representatives of semi-skilled and professional workers from the Wielkopolska region in Poland. Currently, she is investigating the migration of professionals from Poland to Germany and the UK following the May 2004 EU enlargement.
Liz Mellish - Budget officer & webmaster
- Liz is a mature MA student at SSEES currently studying for a MA in Central & South East European Studies. Her main interests are the anthropology and ethnology of South East Europe with particular reference to Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. She has travelled extensively in South East Europe since 1986 undertaking ethnographical research into dance, music, costume and customs in the area. Her particular interests are in folklore as a badge of national and regional identity in South East Europe, and how the position of this has changed since the fall of the Communist regimes in this area. She is trained in ballet and continued dance interests actively within Balkan cultural groups during her previous career in finance. She has been active teaching traditional dance including compiling the Bulgarian national dance syllabus for the ISTD (Imperial School of Teachers of Dance) and educational booklets on Bulgarian and Romanian traditional culture.
Katja Richters
- Katja moved to London in 1995 to read for a BA in Russian, French and Business Studies at Queen Mary College (University of London). As part of this course, she spent two semesters at the Université Laval in Quebec studying French, Russian and Music and one semester at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow concentrating on Russian language. She graduated in 1999 with an Upper Second Class Honours degree. After working as a Research Manager for a London-based publishing company for two years, she returned to education in 2001 and successfully completed a Master’s degree in Cultural Identity Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her dissertation on the Russian Orthodox Church’s vision of the post-communist Russian national identity was awarded a distinction.
  In 2004, she started her MPhil/PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL) under the supervision of Dr Peter Duncan and Prof Geoffrey Hosking. She is researching the political and social thought of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1992 to 2004. At the beginning of her second year, she was upgraded to the PhD. Her first publications are currently in preparation.
Katerina Mantouvalou
- Katerina graduated from the Ionian University (Greece) in 2003 with a BA in History. In 2004 she obtained an MA in History from UCL. Since January 2005 she has been studying for a PhD at SSEES, UCL. The topic of her thesis is "Multicultural Regimes in South-Eastern Europe: The Minority of Western Thrace, Greece". In her PhD she examines interethnic relations in the ethnically mixed region of Western Thrace from 1908 until nowadays. The aim of her research is to explore the impact of different Multicultural Regimes (Ottoman, Nation State/League of Nations, Cold War, Security and Human Rights Regime) on the minority's claims and intercommunity relations. Her areas of study are history and political theory, and her research interests are multiculturalism, nationalism and South-East European history. She currently teaches a course in Modern Greek language (A level) in a high school in London.
Irina Marin
- Irina is junior teaching assistant at the English Department, University of Bucharest, taking critical concepts and 18^th-century English literature seminars. She holds an MA degree in British Cultural Studies from the University of Bucharest with a dissertation on the practices of taboo and the interaction between the public and the private sphere in the 18^th century. In September 2005 she started a PhD on Romanian inceptive nationalism at SSEES, UCL.
Andrew Rozeik
- Andrew is a PhD student at SSEES, UCL. He is researching economic aspects of the automotive industry in Central and Eastern Europe. Specifically it investigates the growth and global integration of the automotive industry in CEECs since 1989, through the complex interrelationship between foreign direct investment, trade and organisational modes of production.
Eszter Tarsoly
- Eszter is a postgraduate student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies on the MA course in Central and South-East European Studies. In September 2005 she will start a PhD at SSEES on the ‘Slavonic and East European Languages’ program. Her main field of interest is language contact, language planning and linguistic purism, with special regard to Hungary and the circum-Pannonian region. Besides her studies she is also a part-time teacher of Hungarian as a second language for adults.
  She graduated in 2004 at the University Eötvös Loránd of Budapest where she studied descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, literary theory and Hungarian literature. During her undergraduate studies she developed a strong interest in diverse interdisciplinary approaches to language and linguistic thought. She took part in a linguistic anthropology fieldwork in a Romany-speaking Gipsy minority community in Southern Hungary as well as in a research group which studied language contact, language acquisition and language shift in Hungarian-speaking native (csángó) communities in Romanian Moldavia. She was the project leader and a teacher in language summer school camps for bilingual pupils in one of these communities. In her final dissertation she looked at linguistic value-judgements in their historical context, through the examination and evaluation of stylistic labels in the main descriptive dictionaries of Hungarian. In her MA thesis on linguistic purism she will examine how beliefs about, and attitudes towards language express deeper social conflicts which arise from linguistic and cultural contact in East-Central Europe in the last decades of the 20th century.
Matt White
Sarah Butterworth
- Sarah is a mature student at SSEES and a Community Development practitioner. Since 1994 she has worked in Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo for several INGOs, managing and training teams in psychosocial intervention for children and young people. Whilst living overseas she has developed a strong love of Balkan cultures and people. Sarah has established several projects including the Crossing Borders schools linking project engaging village schools in the UK, Bosnia and Romania. She has a Masters degree in Community Arts and specialises in creative methodologies to help build coping mechanisms and overcome exclusion, after conflict and natural disaster. In 2004 she ran a similar project in Bam, Iran, for World Vision International. Much of her work focuses on building local skills and developing local organisations, and she is currently studying another MA in Politics, Security and Integration with a view to supporting the development of the voluntary sector in the Balkans and the former Soviet states, particularly in the areas of local government and voluntary sector relations, and civil society development. Sarah currently writes community development strategies for Bromley Borough Council, but longs to return Eastwards.
Lizzie Hoyle
- Lizzie is just completing her Master’s degree at SSEES focusing on the political transition and reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia with advanced regional language skills. She is committed to working in the field of international development with specialised knowledge and relevant experience in the transitional Eastern European economies. She was an OSCE Observer for the repeat 2nd round Presidential Elections in the Ukraine in December 2004, and in March 2005 was an OSCE Observer for Parliamentary elections in Republic of Moldova . She is currently working in the House of Commons as a Research Assistant to an MP.
Nadia Stoyanova
- In 2005, Nadezhda completed her SSEES MA degree in Politics, Security and Integration as a Chevening Scholar from Bulgaria. Currently, she is advancing her knowledge of comparative security and conflict resolution in South-Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland in the MA Programme of Nationalism Studies in CEU-Budapest. Nadia has enhanced her international academic skills with distinction through the OSI-UEP in the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She returned with a zeal to encourage and lead student activities in her home University of National and World Economy-Sofia, which she graduated as a BA in International Relations with Cum Laude in 2004. She came into contact with the practical experience of her interests through "Seeing is Believing" with WITNESS, NYC, in 2002 and the launch of skill-building courses for diplomats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bulgaria with the Diplomatic Institute in 2004. This experience prompted her to undertake the research of identity desecuritization which she is hoping to master as a PhD student in the near future.
Max Fras
- Max is an MPhil/PhD student at UCL, researching in Polish foreign policy and the role of religion in Polish politics. In 2005, he graduated from the Institute of International Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He also read Jewish-Christian relations at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations. Besides his academic activities, Max works as a project manager in Minorities of Europe, a pan-European NGO dealing with minority issues and cultural diversity.
Ekaterina Lazarova
Ana Jese
NOTE: All pages will print in printer friendly format automatically

The 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference School of Slavonic and East European Studies sponsors links page

©2005, Last updated Aug-05