Visiting Scholars
Matvey Lomonosov is an assistant professor at the School for Environmental and Social Studies at the University of Tyumen (Siberia) and is also affiliated with the North-West Institute of Management in the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Saint Petersburg). He received his PhD in Sociology from McGill University in Montreal. Before that he earned a BA degree in History at Perm State University (Russia), an MA in International Relations at the University of Tirana (Albania) and an MA in Nationalism Studies at Central European University (Budapest). This multi-sited educational history has allowed him to learn several Eastern European languages and acquire broad experience in archival, ethnographic and interview research in the region.
Matvey is a comparative-historical sociologist with an expertise in mixed methods. His research focuses on the diffusion of nationalism, social memory, citizenship regimes, and environmental activism in Southeast Europe and Eurasia. His studies have been published in different languages in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the U.K. and the Balkan countries.
Recently, he received the Dominique Jacquin-Berdal Prize from the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism for the best 2021 article written by an early career scholar and published in Nations and Nationalism.
Anna Grutza is a PhD Candidate in Comparative History at the Central European University in Budapest / Vienna. She holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the Bauhaus-University Weimar (Germany) and an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe (Poland).
In her dissertation, she focuses on Cold War truth regimes, questions of epistemology, and subjectivity as well as objectivity in relation to the work of the US-American broadcaster Radio Free Europe (RFE) and its Research Institute. While being critical of the employment of the term ‘paranoia’ by US social scientists, she analyses the term as an epistemic criterion and organizing concept, its ways of shaping possibilities of knowledge and its feedback processes upon Cold War scientific and political discourses. Against these discourses, she approaches the everyday life of Polish citizens who were correspondents and listeners of Western radio stations like RFE and tries to identify the early use of punitive medicine / psychiatric diagnoses against regime opponents by the Polish secret services in the postwar years.
In general, she works on the intersection between the history of Cold War social sciences, the history of everyday life and the history of emotions. She regards the problematic of ‘paranoia’ as being indicative of a particular Cold War irrationality.
